With IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8, we have an all new, redesigned Lotus Notes client with increased functionality and a far superior user interface. Maintaining server performance with this new client was of critical importance, and the developerWorks Lotus article, “IBM Lotus Domino 8 server with the IBM Lotus Notes 8 client: Performance," describes the performance of Lotus Domino 8 server for users of Lotus Notes Remote Procedure Calls (NRPCs) on all platforms.

In this article, we show how customers can incrementally upgrade their Lotus Domino 7 mail infrastructure to Lotus Domino 8 and reap CPU and I/O improvements during the upgrade process. We measured and analyzed thousands of simulated Lotus Notes users running in common mail and calendar scenarios. We used the new workloads, N8Mail and N7Mail, that model transactions observed while tracing the Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Notes 7 clients.

For more detail on the new workloads, see the developerWorks article, "IBM Lotus Notes 8 workloads: Taking performance to a new level."

The tests suites that we ran for this article are designed to help you understand the Lotus Domino 8 performance compared to that of Lotus Domino 7 and to assist you with your upgrade planning. For these tests, we focused on a typical mail deployment of about 4,000 users running on a Microsoft Windows server. We ran four tests in our lab environment to mirror a step-by-step upgrade from a Lotus Notes and Domino 7 environment to a Lotus Notes and Domino 8 environment.

1. Consider the first test the baseline. It is a Lotus Domino 7 server running with te Notes 7 mail template and exercised with the N7Mail workload, which simulates a Lotus Notes 7 client mail user.
2. The second test represents a deployment upgrading from the Lotus Domino 7 server to the Lotus Domino 8 server, with Notes 7 mail databases at Lotus Domino 7 ODS 43 and exercised with the N7Mail workload to simulate users who have not yet migrated to the new Lotus Domino 8 client.
3. The third test represents a deployment running the Lotus Domino 8 server and still using Notes 7 mail databases, but with the mail databases upgraded to use the new Lotus Domino 8 ODS 48, and exercised with the N7Mail workload to simulate users that have not migrated yet to the new Lotus Domino 8 client.
4. The fourth test represents a fully upgraded Lotus Domino 8 and Notes 8 deployment. This test consists of a Lotus Domino 8 server running with Notes 8 mail databases and using the new Lotus Domino 8 ODS 48, and exercised with the N8Mail workload, which simulates a new Lotus Notes 8 client mail user.

For quick reference, the labels on the charts in the Results section are summarized in table 1.

NOTE: The results in this article are from benchmarks executed in a controlled environment. Although some effort was made during the creation of the benchmark to include typical user operations, real users will likely make different use of Lotus Domino than the narrow range of function that is tested by the benchmark. Use these numbers primarily to understand the relative performance of the Lotus Domino releases; they do not represent recommendations for real-world deployment. For assistance with capacity planning, we recommend that you consult your hardware vendor and IBM TechLine, which handles capacity planning for new hardware purchases.

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Lotus Domino server upgrade results

Tables 2 and 3 show the hardware and software configurations for our Microsoft Windows tests.

In our tests, the Lotus Domino Notes.ini values in the following sections represent the culmination of many measurements and extensive statistical analysis. The use of these values is not recommended without analyzing the performance of a production Lotus Domino server. Also, be aware that the Notes.ini settings shown here for one platform may not work well on a different platform. For an explanation of what each of the INI parameters is used for and how to determine the optimum value range, refer to the Appendix.

In our tests, Lotus Domino was set up as a single partition server on an IBM eServer xSeries 3850 running Microsoft Windows 2003 64-bit Enterprise Server with eight processors and with 8 GB of memory recognized by the Microsoft Windows operating system. The Lotus Domino executable files were installed on one IBM FAStT 600 (200 GB, RAID 0). The mail databases were spread across three IBM FAStT 600 arrays, 800 GB each, RAID 0. Transaction logging was set up on a separate three-disk array of 200 GB each, RAID 0. Mail Journaling was set up on a separate disk array. Network access was through a single 1 GB Ethernet adapter running in full-duplex mode. Microsoft Windows pagefile was set up on a two-disk, RAID 0 array.

Lotus Domino 8.0 running on Microsoft Windows 2003 64-bit Enterprise Server offers improvement in CPU utilization and I/O performance. As you see in figure 1, all three Lotus Domino 8.0 server-based runs offer CPU improvement over Lotus Domino 7.0 during the step-by-step upgrade to Lotus Domino 8.0, durign the upgrade of the mail databases to the new ODS 48 format, and during use of the new mail8.ntf. This is good news for customer deployments; it means that you can start taking advantage of the new and redesigned Lotus Notes 8 client without upgrading your server hardware to accommodate the new client.

As you see in figure 2, all three Lotus Domino 8.0 server-based runs offer good improvement in total disk I/O operations per second (IOPS) over Lotus Domino 7.0. Lotus Domino 8.0 with ODS 48 mail databases and optimized mail8.ntf offers a significant improvement in IOPS over Lotus Domino 7 using ODS 43 mail databases and mail7.ntf.

The reduction in disk IOPS in Lotus Domino 8.0 server configurations comes primarily from the decrease in total disk reads per second. There is a substantial reduction in total disk writes per second when upgrading the mailfiles from mail7.ntf to mail8.ntf. This reduction stems primarily from optimization in the database view management code to build view collations on demand.

In table 4, we compare several key resource utilization metrics on the Lotus Domino server at a Vuser load of 4,000 users for each of the four tests.

The key resource metrics that show an increase from Lotus Domino 7 to Lotus Domino 8 are these:

• Increase in Lotus Domino server memory usage on Lotus Domino 8.0 when upgrading mail files from ODS 43 to ODS 48 by about 5.3 percent. There is a further increase of about 3.6 percent when upgrading mail files from mail7.ntf to mail8.ntf. The net increase in Lotus Domino server memory usage is attributed to improvements in in-memory database cache and to increase in the size of database ODS elements. These optimizations in the new ODS helped to decrease the disk IOPS in Lotus Domino 8.
• Lotus Domino server network bytes per second sent and received when upgrading to the new Notes 8 client increased by about 8 percent. To improve the caching of documents in a database view or folder during page scrolling, the Lotus Notes 8.0 client requests more documents than can fit in a page. While the Lotus Notes 7.0 client requests 42 documents in the Inbox, the Lotus Notes 8.0 client requests 50 documents in the Inbox for a given screen size.

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Conclusion

From the measurements reported in this article, upgrading to Lotus Domino 8 and the new Lotus Notes 8 client should be a very positive experience. We see CPU reductions across the board as well as I/O reductions on most platforms when compared to Lotus Notes and Domino 7. We see some increase in network and memory utilization, so installations that are sensitive to those parameters should plan accordingly. We showed the incremental improvement in performance as you upgrade Lotus Domino 7 and Notes 7 to a Lotus Domino 8 and Notes 8 infrastructure on the Microsoft Windows platform. The performance improvement observed on upgrading to the Lotus Domino 8 and Notes 8 infrastructure on other platforms varies, so be sure to consult your hardware vendor.

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Appendix

Resources

Learn

• Visit the developerWorks Lotus Performance page for even more performance information.
  
  
• Read the developerWorks article, "IBM Lotus Notes V8: Taking performance to a new level."
  
  
• Read the developerWorks article, "IBM Lotus Domino V8 server with the IBM Lotus Notes V8 client: Performance."
  
  
• Read the "Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Reviewer's Guide."
  
  

Get products and technologies

• Download a trial of IBM Lotus Domino.
  
  
• Download a trial of IBM Lotus Notes, Domino Designer, and Domino Administrator clients.
  
  

Discuss

• Participate in the discussion forum.
  
  
• Participate in the developerWorks Lotus team blog.
  
  

About the authors

Comments (Undergoing maintenance)

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Table of contents

• Lotus Domino server upgrade results
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Resources
• About the authors
• Comments

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