Server stability R5 v. R6.5

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

For as long as my company has had Notes (since R2!), server uptime has been outstanding. It has been extremely rare to find a Notes server down, even with 16,000 users pounding on them.

However, in recent months it seems that at least one of the servers is down almost every day. It was also sometime last year that we switched the servers from R5.0 to R6.5. I am not in the group that manages our servers, but I can’t help wonder if there’s a connection.

Does anyone have an opinion about whether Domino R6.5 is more or less stable than R5? Has anyone else experienced more or less downtime after switching?

Thanks for the input.

2

Subject: Server stability R5 v. R6.5

We run Domion on Linux, iSeries, and Windows servers. We have not seen significant downtime since upgrading to R6.5.

“Downtime” for Notes users can be caused by many factors, including, but not limited to:

  • poor configuration/management of servers

  • problems with third-party software on the Domino server (such as anti-virus or backup)

  • network issues (server is up, but you can’t get to it)

  • other hardware issues, including server hardware that doesn’t meet requirements to run R6

etc.

So, my opinion is that the upgrade to R6.5 itself is not usually problematic. However, downtime is highly specific to your environment.

Recommendations:

  • If you have a Helpdesk, you should be calling them each time you notice an outage.

  • If they aren’t able to resolve the problem, then I would recommend that you voice your concerns one step above them in a way that doesn’t appear to implicate R6 (just say you’ve seen lots of downtime in recent months, and be prepared to name certain servers on certain days). If it is R6’s fault, that will come out in the ensuing investigation.

3

Subject: agree

.

4

Subject: Server stability R5 v. R6.5

The current code levels of Domino 6.5 (i.e. 6.5.2, 6.5.3) are, in my opinion, not as stable as the more mature 5.x releases (e.g. 5.0.11).

If you aren’t running 6.5.2FP1 or 6.5.3FP1, by all means do so.

6.5.4, which was just released, should fix a substantial number of stability issues (it’s got the second largest fix list in R5/ND6 history). I would give that a try ASAP.