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Having a weekly maintenance schedule is a crucial part of maintaining good health of your Domino server. Domino provides a simple way to schedule maintenance tasks using Program Documents in the Domino Directory. This article provides best practices for routine maintenance.
Fixup and Transaction Logging
One of the benefits of transaction logging is that if a server is restarted following a fault (server failure, power failure, hardware failure etc.), logged databases do not require a consistency check before users can access it. After you set up transaction logging, Fixup is not needed or used to bring databases back to a consistent state.
Therefore for transaction logged servers, the Fixup task should not be scheduled to run regularly.
Regular Maintenance
Regular Maintenance of the Domino Directory is essential to maintain the health of a server and optimize performance. Administrators can use the following tips as a starting point to create a maintenance schedule tailored to their environment.
IBM technote 1248830 provides a short summary.
Weekly Reboot of Windows Servers
Many customers reboot their Windows servers on a monthly schedule to prevent memory leaks.
Recover Database White space
When documents and attachments are deleted from a database, Domino tries to reuse the unused space, rather than immediately reduce the file size. Sometimes Domino cannot reuse the space or, because of fragmentation, cannot reuse the space effectively until you compact the database.
The following command can be scheduled to run at the weekend using a Program Document:
- compact -b -s 10 (Archive Transaction Logging enabled)
- compact -B -s 10 (Circular or ArchivedTransaction Logging disabled)
With the above command, any database that has more than 10% white space will be compacted. The -b, or -B means that the server will perform an in-place compaction. The b (lowercase) switch should be used with transaction logs so that it does not assign new DBIIDs to the databases.
Note: New with 8.5.2, the compact -ODS switch performs a copy-style compact only if the current ODS is less than desired default ODS. This is useful if you need to perform a compact to implement new features (such as document data compression).
Compact Administration Requests database
The following command can be scheduled to run at the weekend using a Program Document:
With the above command, a copy style compact is performed. This is useful because it can solve database corruption (a new DBIID will be assigned). The -t switch will disable transaction logging for that system database.
Note: If a new DBIID is assigned to a database, a full backup of the database should be performed as soon as possible. This is because old transaction logs can no longer be restored to that database. For more information about the database DBIID, read
IBM technote 7003909.
Database Corruption
There is no need to run fixup or updall as part of the weekly maintenance schedule. Fixup should be run only if you suspect corruption in a database and updall is run every night by default. You only need to run updall with switches if you suspect view corruption or other such problems within the views.
If a database corruption is detected, run compact -c first. If the a view index has become corrupted, run updall -r -t
. The database corruption troubleshooting guide has additional suggestions to minimize corruption within a database.
Hard Disk Fragmentation
SAN or RAID-5 based Domino data volumes can be affected by fragmentation. The mechanical hard-disk is the slowest component of a server. Maintaining file fragmentation can help maintain performance. The Hard Disk fragmentation Notes/Domino wiki article explains in-depth hard-disk fragmentation and its effect on Domino servers.
Note: File fragmentation also affects workstations. Regular o/s de-fragmentation helps maintain disk performance on users' client machines too.