24-03-2010

8.5.1 is still broken for large applications

Category Lotus Notes Lotus Domino LotusScript
A while ago Erik Brooks blogged about a major problem introduced in Notes/Domino 8.5.1. IBM reacted to this quite fast and released a fix for the problem.
Erik has posted a summary of where we are with the issue here: 8.5.1 UNFAIL - Part 2: The Fix.

Basically the problem introduced in 8.5.1 is that the behaviour of all variants of GetSOMETHINGByKey (For instance GetAllDocumentsByKey) has changed compared to earlier releases of Notes/Domino. Now the LotusScript might fail with "The collection has become invalid" if the view used was updated while the LotusScript code was running.
If you have an application with "lots" of document updates, this issue will show up at your site.

A fix was released, but only available on request from Lotus Support. But at least you can have it.

Now it looks like the fix is actually only a half way fix. It apparently only addresses the issue when the LotusScript is executed on the Lotus Domino server. In an agent for instance. But the original problem is also seen when the GetSOMETHINGByKey is executed from a Lotus Notes client. Have a look in the comments on the original blog entry. Comments number 27, 28 and 29: 8.5.1 FAIL. Your code may just break.

Most of the organisations that I know who have Notes/Domino Applications will experience this problem. This is a major bug, and it does not sound like it is scheduled for a quick fix.

Posted by Jens Bruntt At 09:37:19 Location Skanderborg | | Comments (10)

07-09-2009

8-server advanced Domino clustering - can I do this?

Category Lotus Domino
I have a customer where we are considering going from 6 to 8 servers in the cluster. Either that or we will have two clusters consisting of 4 in one cluster and 4 in the other and then having scheduled replication of selected databases between the two.

We had some discussions today about what can be done with clusters. And I have a feeling that this scenario might work. I'll make a less complicated description of what we discussed below.

Servers:

A1, A2
B1, B2
C1, C2

B1 and B2 do not allow Notes RPC, only HTTP.

Let's say we have 100 databases in play across the 6 servers. 100 unique replica IDs.

On A1 and A2 we have 50 databases in replicas on both.
On C1 and C2 we also have 50 databases in replicas on the two.
On B1 and B2 we have all 100 databases in replicas on both servers.

A1 and A2 share 25 replicas with C1 and C2.  In other words 25 replicas exist on all 6 servers.

The reason why there are some databases that we do not want available on all servers is that there is a huge amount of document creations and updates in these databases, leading to the Indexer task running all the time.
We will let the users from department A access databases on servers A1 and A2 and the useres from department B will access databases on servers B1 and B2.

We will be running this on Domino 8.5. The OS will be Windows 2003. It is most  likely to be a 64 bit (both Domino and OS) setup.
The cluster will be running cluster replication on their own gigabit network.

Is this an effective and efficient setup?
Let's say that server A1 drops out. Will my Notes client try to access a database on a server that does not have it available?
When I create a document on server C1 in a database that only has replicas on C1, C2, B1 and B2 will C1 try to push the document to A1 and B2 too?

I have tried to google about these questions, but did not find any answers.



Posted by Jens Bruntt At 16:10:58 Location Skanderborg | | Comments (8)

11-06-2009

Monitoring Domino with Nagios using SNMP - research results

Category Lotus Domino Server Monitoring
I set up a Nagios server for monitoring the servers at work a while ago. It works just great. Highly recommended.
Then one of my colleagues wanted to look into whether we could monitor a Google Search Appliance (GSA) using the Nagios server. He found out that that can only be done using SNMP as you are not allowed to really get down to the OS of the GSA. He found it difficult to find his way through how to make it work. So I did a bid of research.

First I wanted to know if Nagios is able to monitor servers that expose SNMP-information. The answer looks to be a yes: check_snmp.

Then I wanted to get access to a server that was exposing SNMP-information. And for me the logical choice is to look at what Domino has to offer. And Domino does have an option for SNMP.
You need to install and configure something on the OS and then you need to install a Domino-specific service and load at least one Domino server task. The place to look for the Domino end of this is in the Administrator documentation, look for a document titled "The Domino SNMP Agent".

Then there is the Nagios end of things. How to get Nagios to get hold ot the SNMP information that Domino is making available. Here I found something that looks very interesting: Monitoring Lotus Notes/Domino Servers. It was posted a while back, but I would be surprised if it wouldn't work.
Be aware of the three downloads available from the bottom of the page. Especially the one labelled lotus-monitoring.tar.gz. Looks good. It's Domino-specific SNMP checks. For things like how many emails are dead or the availability index.

Finally I also found a promising script for Nagios - a Nagios plugin - that will probe SNMP information on the GSA: You can find information on this page: Monitoring a Google Search Appliance with Nagios. You have to scroll down a bit to find the section on Google Search Appliance monitoring.

I have not tested any of these things, but they look good. Well, actually I did test the GSA-specific script, and it told me our internal GSA wasn't responding... In all likelyhood the GSA hasn't been configured to expose SNMP data.

Posted by Jens Bruntt At 21:38:36 Location Copenhagen | | Comments (7)

13-05-2009

Does DAOS help us with the 64 GB limit on NSFs?

Category Lotus Domino DAOS
We have a customer who has a NSF that is approaching the 64 GB limit on NSF files. The NSF is full of File attachments.
We had a discussion, but I can't find the answer:
Let's say I DAOS-enable this NSF that now, today is reported as having a size of perhaps 50 GB , and the DAOS-enabling moves perhaps 40 GB of Attachments to the disk system and out of the NSF.
I am pretty sure that the Properties box of the database will still report the database as taking up 50 GB - the original size.
But I am also pretty sure that when i look at the OS-level and take a look at the NSF file on disk, it will be taking up only the 10 GB that is actually in the database.

The official IBM guidelines say that going beyond a NSF size of 64 GB is not supported. Here is the question: That 64 GB limit is that when looking at the Property box or is it when you look on the file system size of the NSF?

Posted by Jens Bruntt At 12:23:12 Location Copenhagen | | Comments (3)

05-02-2009

View indexing performance on Domino 8.5 - twice as good as 7

Category Lotus Domino
A colleague of mine did a test this week. How does View Indexing perform on Domino 8.5 compared to version 7?
And the results are looking real good. Generally the View indexer on Domino 8.5 indexes the same number of documents in half the time compared to Domino 7.
A quick look at the test environment:
He created a test environment on Windows 2008 server.
He had four databases. Each database contained four views.
Database 1: Contains four views with columns that sort text.
Database 2: Contains four views with columns that display un-sorted text.
Database 3: Contains four views with columns that display sorted numbers.
Database 4: Contains four views with columns that display un-sorted numbers.
Database 5: Contains four views with columns that display categorized text.
Database 6: Contains four views with columns that display cascade-categorized text.

Each of the four views in each database contains an increasing number of columns. The first view has one column, the second view has two columns and so on.
For instance Database contains:
One view with one catageorized column.
One view with two catageorized columns.
One view with three catageorized columns.
One view with four catageorized columns.

What he then did was to start out with empty databases.
For each database he now created 100.000 documents.
This is done by a LotusScript agent.
The agent sets view.autorefresh=false on all four views.
It creates sets of 1.000 documents and then does a view.refresh. It takes note of how much time was used for indexing each view.

For this test size the general findings were these - based on averages:
  • Performance is increased in all types of indexing (the 6 database types - categorized, unsorted etc.).
  • The top performance increase is with views with fewer rather than more columns. So a view with one sorted column has a performance increase that is larger than the performance increase seen on a view with two sorted columns. For instance a view with one sorted column indexes four times faster on 8.5 than on 7. A view with two sorted colum indexes two times faster on 8.5 than on 7.
  • For unsorted views there is practically no performance gains.
  • Generally speaking indexing is around two times faster with Domino 8.5 than seen on 7.

Some of us have experiencing problems with the View indexer on Domino, so bringing down indexing times by halt of course is great news.

My good colleague Morten is preparing a new series of tests where he is indexing 1.000.000 documents.



Posted by Jens Bruntt At 16:21:18 Location Skanderborg | | Comments (1)

Søg

Translation

Start

Velkommen til min blog.
Jeg hedder Jens Bruntt, og det du ser her er min weblog.
Her finder du løst og fast om arbejde, familie, internettet, det digitale liv, bøger, film, spil og hvad jeg ellers synes er vigtigt. Hvis du vil vide mere om mig så kig på Om Jens Bruntt.
Du kan komme til forsiden her

Arkiv

Jens vægt-o-meter

12/08-06: 96,9 kg
14/10-06: 90,1 kg
14/08-07: 94,3 kg
07/11-07: 88,9 kg
09/11-08: 96,3 kg
03/02-09: 93,6 kg
09/08-09: 96,7 kg
30/12-09: 89.6 kg
25/01-10: 88.9 kg
09/03-10: 87.3 kg
31/03-10: 86.3 kg
26/08-10: 94.2 kg

Googles

MiscLinks

BlogSphere LotusGeek Login RSS Feed Custom Button Custom Button

Emner

geocaching

Profile for jbruntt

Visitors

Locations of visitors to this page