Well, it’s Tuesday not Thursday, but I think the ability to enable all the following compression options at once should be brought to wider notice.
New in 8.0.2 (and I believe also available in 8.5) is the ability to enable LZ1 attachment compression via the command line switch compact -ZU -C. This switch has been around for a while, but previously it required the database to already be enabled for LZ1 compression via advanced database properties. Also, it previously only converted Huffman-compressed attachments to LZ1 compression (now it does uncompressed attachments as well).
This means that if you want to enable design, data and attachment compression for all your mail files after an upgrade to Domino 8.0.2 you only need the following three commands:
set config Create_R8_Databases=1
dbcache flush
load compact -ZU -n -v -C mail
I do recommend that you do it during off peak hours (because of the CPU utilization and the need for exclusive DB access). Also you may want to stop the router and SMTP tasks for the duration. For a large mail server, measure throughput on some sample databases and plan accordingly.
There are several reports around of compression saving between 20% and 30% storage, but more real-world results would be useful. Measure the size of your mail folder before and after and post your results. (For an apples-to-apples comparison, run compact against the folder before the first measurement, so that you’re not counting reclaimed white space.)
Enjoy!
Rupert Clayton
Chicago