How to make your Domino backups faster

The newly released Domino V12 includes the Domino Backup component as one of it's new features. Defrag.NSF V12 has also been released as a V12 companion including integration with the new Domino Backup feature, so we thought it would be a great time to look at what happens when you back up fragmented files.

The issues caused by fragmentation (In a physical or virtualized environment) have an insidiously bad impact on the Domino server's overall performance, the O/S and also backups. For the Windows O/S to work with these fragmented files it has to issue more I/O requests to access these files. This results in Split I/O's where unnecessary multiple I/O requests are generated to access the many fragments of each file and this contributes to I/O bottlenecks resulting in some requests being blocked while other are fulfilled. Here we look at the difference we see when backing up fragmented nsf files compared to nsf files that have been maintained by Defrag.NSF.

In a nutshell, here is the difference from our tests depicted graphically, and that is just one database (we have seen production Domino servers full of databases like this). You should maintain not just the databases themselves but also the contiguous free-space required for the DBMT pre-allocation feature to work, Defrag.NSF does all this.

The pics below show the substantial difference in backup stats logged for the exact same database as typically maintained by Defrag.NSF in a contiguous state and also in a typically un-maintained fragmented state.

Maintained database showing fragment count in Defrag.NSF Database View:

Same database Fragmented and showing fragment count in Defarg.NSF Database View:

Database Backed up when maintained by Defrag.NSF:

Same database backed up when fragmented:

Database Backup I/O when maintained by Defrag.NSF:

Same database backup I/O when fragmented:

After the testing completed Defrag.NSF performed it's am scheduled maintenance on the file and returned it to a contiguous state.

NEW - "Then backup with options" setting on Defrag.NSF's scheduler for each day to call Domino 12's new backup feature automatically after maintenance:

Check out our website for more info and grab a Free 30 day trial https://www.preemptive.com.au/defrag