Thursday, July 26, 2012

Some basic tips to speed up Notes Client/Workstation feel and performance

Aside from the obvious things like more physical memory etc. here are a few things we have seen significantly help speed up up the feel of the Notes client and even the overall performance of the user's workstation.

- Turn off Indexing for the Hard Drive on the Client workstation and Disable the Indexing Service, yes, searching will take longer in Windows but how often are you searching for files in Windows anyway? (or at least do not index any Notes related folders/files). If you work in Notes most of the day and realistically rarely use Windows search, it's a good trade-off.

- Upgrade to the latest ODS level for all local Notes Client databases. The latest On Disk Structure can save you a LOT of unnecessary I/O.

- Utilise Tune Up software on the workstation (System Mechanic). Get it Here: http://www.preemptive.com.au/pctuneup

- Use Defrag.NSF for Notes to automatically defrag the Notes Client related files a few minutes after each start up, the client is defragged and ready for the work day ahead. We talk about it here:

http://ab1osborne.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/defragnsf-for-notes.html

And here it is installing:

http://ab1osborne.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/how-to-install-defragnsf-for-notes.html

- In the Eclipse based Notes client, increase the initial and maximum memory assigned to the Eclipse environment by editing the vmarg.Xmx= and vmarg.Xms= lines in the jvm.properties file according to the memory spec of the machine (For 8.5.1 and onward it's in the Notes\Framework\RCP\Deploy folder). Google jvm.properties lotus notes and you'll get plenty of hits and recommendations about these settings. TLCC has some great info here: http://www.tlcc.com/admin/tips.nsf/tipurlref/20120217

- Check for poorly configured or old/redundant Location Documents and (Low Priority) Connection Documents.

- Enable TCPIP Port compression.

Thanks for reading. Until next time.
 

1 comment:

Dragon Cotterill said...

Here is another tip. Try stopping some of your anti-virus installs from reading your network traffic and the like. For example, McAfee install a driver into the Notes client that can seriously hamper all network traffic.
Look at your notes.ini. Find the entry that starts "EXTMGR_ADDINS=". This is a list of additional .dll files that Notes will launch and run. You will probably find that it has a series of names after it separated by commas.
Look for the entry marked "NCExtMgr" and remove it (and any associated comma).

You don't need it. If you got a virus and you were stupid enough to launch it, Notes extracts it to a temporary directory and the on-demand scanner would catch it.