Symetrik Domino Consulting

I’ve recently stumbled upon using compact -S5 in our weekly Saturday compact program document.

Like most shops, we run Fixup on Fridays and then Compact on Saturdays on all databases.

We found that a couple of servers that have about 400GB worth of mailboxes were not finishing their compact jobs. The compact was taking somewhere in the range of 36 to 48 hours. We weren’t sure how long it was taking because we had to shut it down on Monday morning when people got into the office and starting trying to access their databases.

I found the -S switch which will compact only database which will only compact databases with more white space than you specify in the .

Example: compact -S5 will only compact databases with more than 5% white space.

This dramatically cuts down on the time required to run compact because it will skip all of the databases that are already pretty much compacted, but which may be very large.

We went from 36+ hours to about 6 on two of the large servers. This is a great improvement which really works for us.

One strange thing that I noticed though is that is doesn’t always calculate the white space correctly while initializing the compact job. Sometimes databases that are 90% compacted are skipped when you use the -S5 switch.

We are using 6.5.6FP3 HF53 servers.

Does anybody else have experience with using the -S switch and seen the same anomalies?

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