Symetrik Domino Consulting

Posts Tagged ‘Performance’

I manage an environment with over 1800 mailboxes that are greater than 2GB (including hub and cluster mate copies) and 66 above 10GB. The physical limit of a Domino database is 64GB.

However, anything beyond 2GB becomes very difficult to manage and here’s why.
1. Databases become corrupt very often.
2. Running Fixup or Compact on a weekly basis as part of Domino routine maintenance becomes problematic because the server is always running the maintenance on the databases. In fact, you’ll need to split up fixup and compact to run on specific directories during different evenings of the weeks. You may even want to run Updall on different directories different nights of the week.
3. Backups take forever and may not finish before the beginning of your work day.
4. Opening the mailboxes takes a very long time because it has to index the inbox every time you open it (if the user does not file messages to folders, which most don’t).
5. You pretty much can’t have full text indexing turned on for the server copies of the database because the full text indexing will be continuous around the clock on your server, not to mention more disk space required on server.
6. We’ve had some very strange things happen with Blackberry Enterprise Server accessing very large mailboxes. Specifically, We have had instances where a Domino server running Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) can have frequent outages in IDTable code when working with large ID tables, which causes the server to crash. See technote titled “BES server crash in IDTable code”

7. If users have local replicas of their mailboxes, sometimes their hard drive is not large enough, sometimes the local replica becomes corrupt on the hard drive because no maintenance (fixup/compact) is ever run on it.
8. Creating new replicas onto new servers can take a week across the wire.

The list goes on.

These are real world examples of issues that I come up against every week. The best practice is to have quota policies in place that the upper management supports.

The second major thing to note here is that a proper archiving solution needs to be implemented. The local archiving that is built into Notes is often times not sufficient if you have so many enourmous mail files.