September 1 2008 Monday

8.0.2 Lotus Notes Relative Performance

Since Lotus Notes 8.0.2 (and Lotus Domino) went gold last week, I have been busily testing and retesting the performance increases in start time and a reduced memory foot print. To say IBM Lotus have done a phenomenal job is an understatement. It is nothing short of amazing what the folks at IBM have managed to achieve.

Below is a attached HTML table of comparative values for 8.0.0, 8.0.1 and 8.0.2. Over the next few weeks I will try to add more "configurations".  For example a slightly lower spec'd laptop and a reasonable desktop running an older Athlon XP 1600+ with 1GB RAM (some of our sales people actually run on this now, and it is very, very usable) together with the Lotus Notes 8.0.x client only install.

Other things I did notice:

  • the extraction of 8.0.1 and 8.0.2 seems to take way longer than 8.0.0 did. This may have to do with the added functionality, but whatever the reason if you are installing more than a handful you probably want to extract the files first to a file share or DVD. This will also keep a ton of temporary files out of the TEMP folder on the target computers.
  • it looks like the provisioning takes place during the install of 8.0.2 and NOT the first time the client starts. This could attribute the extended install time we have seen for 8.0.2 comparable to previous 8.0.x releases.
  • notes2w.exe seems to stay in RAM a good 5-8 seconds after Notes is closed. Make sure that all processess have exited before trying a restart otherwise you will get the big, scary eclipse JVM error box (well, more the size of a screen!).
As always, these values are provided as-is and your testing may give different results. This posting is only to give the reader a relative performance indicator.
Darren Duke   |   September 1 2008 02:35:00 PM   |    8.0.2  lotus notes  performance    |  
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Comments (7)

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1 - Albert Buendia    http://slugmail.slug.es    09/02/2008 1:13:59 AM

Hi Darren,

Thanks for your excellent post. I totally agree with your Notes 8 Times Table. In fact, now you can run Notes Standart Client in machines with only 512 Mb. That was impossible mission in previous versions. This is the first Eclipse Notes client that satisfies the needs of my customers.

See you,

Albert

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2 - Darren Duke    http://blog.darrenduke.net    09/02/2008 3:51:44 AM

@Albert, I will probably add 512MB to the mix eventually. I have to admit that I don't actually think I have a computer with ony 512MB in there ;)

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3 - Rob Axelrod       09/02/2008 12:28:06 PM

I ran my tests on an older machine with 1Gb of ram (T42 laptop). And came up with almost identical startup times (33 seconds to availability on cold start and 6 seconds on warm start including entering the password). My test box had no anti-virus and was fairly stripped of software. Next I need to try with 512 and a fully loaded image.

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4 - David Bell       09/02/2008 5:59:42 PM

You're missing memory numbers for ntaskldr.exe in the totals which can itself use quite a lot of memory.

Also, the 8.0.2 memory number for nlnotes.exe, should that not be around 60k instead of 6k ?

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5 - David Bell       09/02/2008 6:00:53 PM

We wish it were K :)

That should of course read:

"Also, the 8.0.2 memory number for nlnotes.exe, should that not be around 60MB instead of 6MB ?"

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6 - Darren Duke    http://blog.darrenduke.net    09/03/2008 6:30:35 PM

Could be a typo on my part. I'll fire up the test machine when I am in the office next.

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7 - Nagaraja    http://www.ibm.com    08/27/2009 10:36:51 AM

We are getting Notes error JVM fail to start error.. Any help is appreciated