Domino 8 performance improvements
February 26 2007
As our Domino development team rapidly approaches a key milestone, the availability of public beta for Domino 8 (due VERY soon), we are starting today to publish more details to help your planning. We hope you will want to download to code and participate as soon as we make the Domino 8 beta available. Today we'll look at performance and efficiency improvements.
Domino 7 delivered improvements in performance with most of the focus around reducing CPU requirements by between 25-50%. In Domino 8, there are a number of further performance and other improvements that can potentially allow you servers run even more efficiently, without hardware upgrades. Here are some of the more visible and valuable improvements. We hope you will want to take advantage of them:
Design note compression
The option to use design note compression has been added to Lotus Domino 8 to help reduce the I/O and the space utilization associated with design information. The compression, which is transparent to Notes applications, typically reduces the size of a design note by as much as 60% (based on preliminary test results we have seen in Domino labs).
Streaming cluster replication
You could consider this to be Domino's 2nd generation of clustering capability, making Notes client fail-over even better. In order to improve cluster replication performance and reduce the overhead that this can have on server I/O, Lotus Domino 8 introduces the concept of streaming cluster replication. Cluster replication is used to ensure that replica databases in a cluster are as up-to-date as possible in order to support fail over and load balancing of servers. In Domino 8, it is event-driven, rather than schedule-driven, so when a cluster replicator learns of a change to a database, it immediately pushes that change to other replicas in the cluster, meaning that data is very up to date on all cluster-mates.
With prior versions of Lotus Domino, the replicator constantly checked each database in turn to identify whether there were changes to replicate and then would replicate all changes associated with one database before moving onto the next. With Lotus Domino 8, servers propagate events (note updates, folder additions and removals, unread mark operations) to destination servers as they occur. Streaming cluster replication coordinates with existing scheduled replication to reduce its overhead, and it updates replication history periodically to reduce the burden on the regular replicator.
On-demand collations
With Lotus Notes and Domino 8, application developers can reduce the unnecessary server load from creating indices for columns that are not being used by deferring the creation of these indices until the user first chooses to sort the view by a specific column.
Prevent simple search
This new database property “Don't allow simple search” positively impacts server performance by preventing users from searching databases that do not have full-text search enabled. By default, users can always search a database that does not have a full text index but there is a significant impact on the server when this type of ad hoc search is carried out. The new property can prevent users from accidentally selecting a given database as a target of a search and thus impacting server performance.
Admin process improvements
The administration process (AdminP) task automates many of the administrative tasks required to manage a Lotus Domino environment. In Lotus Domino 8, many enhancements have been introduced to improve the efficiency of this process to reduce the resource requirements and speed up the completion of tasks. There are so many improvements in AdminP area that we will cover this in more detail in a follow on article...
Domino 7 delivered improvements in performance with most of the focus around reducing CPU requirements by between 25-50%. In Domino 8, there are a number of further performance and other improvements that can potentially allow you servers run even more efficiently, without hardware upgrades. Here are some of the more visible and valuable improvements. We hope you will want to take advantage of them:
- Design note compression
- Streaming cluster replication
- On-demand collations
- Prevent simple search
- Admin process (Admin P) improvements
Design note compression
The option to use design note compression has been added to Lotus Domino 8 to help reduce the I/O and the space utilization associated with design information. The compression, which is transparent to Notes applications, typically reduces the size of a design note by as much as 60% (based on preliminary test results we have seen in Domino labs).
Streaming cluster replication
You could consider this to be Domino's 2nd generation of clustering capability, making Notes client fail-over even better. In order to improve cluster replication performance and reduce the overhead that this can have on server I/O, Lotus Domino 8 introduces the concept of streaming cluster replication. Cluster replication is used to ensure that replica databases in a cluster are as up-to-date as possible in order to support fail over and load balancing of servers. In Domino 8, it is event-driven, rather than schedule-driven, so when a cluster replicator learns of a change to a database, it immediately pushes that change to other replicas in the cluster, meaning that data is very up to date on all cluster-mates.
With prior versions of Lotus Domino, the replicator constantly checked each database in turn to identify whether there were changes to replicate and then would replicate all changes associated with one database before moving onto the next. With Lotus Domino 8, servers propagate events (note updates, folder additions and removals, unread mark operations) to destination servers as they occur. Streaming cluster replication coordinates with existing scheduled replication to reduce its overhead, and it updates replication history periodically to reduce the burden on the regular replicator.
On-demand collations
With Lotus Notes and Domino 8, application developers can reduce the unnecessary server load from creating indices for columns that are not being used by deferring the creation of these indices until the user first chooses to sort the view by a specific column.
Prevent simple search
This new database property “Don't allow simple search” positively impacts server performance by preventing users from searching databases that do not have full-text search enabled. By default, users can always search a database that does not have a full text index but there is a significant impact on the server when this type of ad hoc search is carried out. The new property can prevent users from accidentally selecting a given database as a target of a search and thus impacting server performance.
Admin process improvements
The administration process (AdminP) task automates many of the administrative tasks required to manage a Lotus Domino environment. In Lotus Domino 8, many enhancements have been introduced to improve the efficiency of this process to reduce the resource requirements and speed up the completion of tasks. There are so many improvements in AdminP area that we will cover this in more detail in a follow on article...
