IBM Domino, a very annoying performance issue now SOLVED


For the past years a customer of mine has had IBM Domino performance issues with a Domino Server.

The issue concerned was really felt when working with attachments.


The company has small offices around the world, so we use SmartUpgrade (which in general works well) to manage Notes Feature Pack upgrades.
We attach the Feature Pack as an attachment in the SmartUpgrade database and use a Policy to push it to users.
Normally this is very fast, but for one server it would maybe take 5 hours to download the file.
The download would start at a decent speed and then only get slower and slower and in the end literally only move a few bytes at the time.
We tried "everything" ...even moving to newer faster hardware did not make any change.

The server is a Windows 2012 R2 server with Domino 9.0.1. FP8 in a Domino cluster. The other server is Linux server which did not have the issue.

The solution
The relevant difference between the two servers Domino in the Notes.ini configuration, was the setting for TCP.
The customer use encryption and compression on the Notes TCP connection

Notes.ini
The Windows server had: TCPIP=TCP,0,15,0,,45088
The Linux server had: TCPIP=TCP, 0, 15, 0,,32800

If looked at the documentation for TCP setting it says:

The TCPIP port line can contain up to six arguments as described below, with the first position numbered as position 0.

Initialization arguments:
argv[0] Driver name
argv[1] Adapter number (unused)
argv[2] Requested number of sessions (unused)
argv[3] Data buffer size to use. If the value is 0, the default size is used. Default sizes are different for different port drivers, as follows:
argv[4] Number of network buffers to preallocate (unused)
argv[5] Port flags, as follows:
0 X 8000 Encryption is enabled
0 X 0020 Compression is requested

Since we use Compression and Encryption of the connection we should have 8020 in hexadecimal for last parameter, which in decimal is 32800.
That is value we had on the fast Linux server. After changing the value on the Windows server to

TCPIP=TCP, 0, 15, 0,,32800

the network was much faster and SmartUpgrade became just as fast as on the Linux server :-)

The big question is why does the Domino installer suggest TCPIP=TCP,0,15,0,,45088 ??
and what are the undocumented Port flags used in this scenario?


Posted on 08/29/2017 09:52:42 AM CEDT