Domino 8.5: W64 2003, AIX 5.3 and Solaris 10 Test Configuration


1 Overview

The IBM System Verification Test (SVT) objective was to execute a set of test scenarios against a test configuration that contains the key requirements and components that created a load on a mixed environment: W64 2003, AIX 5.3 and Solaris 10.

This testing used test scripts currently used by the system test team.

One's perception of system quality is governed under the statement of overall system reliability. A widely accepted definition of software reliability is the probability that a computer system performs its destined purpose without failure over a specified time period within a particular execution environment. This execution environment is known formally as the operational profile, which is defined in terms of sets of possible input values together with their probabilities of occurrence. An operational profile is used to drive a portion of the system testing. Software reliability modeling is therefore applied to data gathered during this phase of testing and then used to predict subsequent failure behavior during actual system operations

A reliability test is one that focuses on the extent to which the feature or system will provide the intended function without failing. The goal of all types of testing is the improvement of the reliability program with specific statements about reliability-specific tests. Reliability is the impact of failures, malfunctions, errors and other defect related problems encountered by customers. Reliability is a measure of the continuous delivery of the correct service (and, the time to failure).

SVT's purpose of running Reliability tests was to ascertain the following:

· Data population for all parts of the infrastructure to force set limits to be achieved and passed

· Running sustained reliability scripts at >100% maximum capacity. Assessing :

· Breakpoints

· System stability pre and post breakpoint

· Serviceability

· Forcing spikes and anti-spikes in usage patterns

· Exposing SMTP, IMAP, POP3 services to 110% of their maximum load

· Flushing out the DB Table spaces to their maximum, proving the maximum, proving ability to recover/get back to a good place when the maximum limits have been exceeded

· Proving serviceability errors and warnings when thresholds are hit

2 Configuration diagram for W64 2003 / AIX 5.3 / Solaris 10 configuration

The W64 2003 / AIX 5.3 / Solaris 10 configuration utilized the following system specifications:

System	W64 2003 machine: 8840 - xSeries 346 AIX 5.3 machine: 9113 - pSeries 550 Solaris 10 machine: Sun\SunFire V240
Processor	W64 2003 machine: 2 CPU's, 3.4 GHz AIX 5.3 machine: 4 CPU's, 1.65 GHz Solaris 10 machine: 2 CPU's, 1.5 GHz
Memory	W64 2003 machine: 4096 Mb AIX 5.3 machine: 8192 Mb Solaris 10 machine: 4096 Mb
Operating System	W64 2003 machine: Win64 2003 server, SP1 AIX 5.3 machine: AIX 5.3, OS revision 5300-08-02-0822 Solaris 10 machine: SunOS 5.10
Domino Server	Lotus Domino 8.5

The environment evaluated consisted of three machines in total; one W64 2003, one AIX 5.3 and one on Solaris 10. Each machine hosted two Domino Partitions (DPAR’s). Each partition hosted 1,000 registered users making the total NAB for the environment 6000 users. For W64 2003 and AIX 5.3, all mail files were local to the Domino servers. On the Solaris 10, the mail files were located on a NAS.

Circular Transaction Logging was enabled and each partition had two mailboxes. The transaction logs were located locally on each server for the purpose of this test.

The design task was run at the start of the test to upgrade the templates. The update task ran for the entire period of the test. Updall ran between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM, or until it finished.

2.1 Evaluation Criteria

The performance of Domino 8.5 were evaluated under the following criteria:

· Server CPU: The overall CPU of the server were monitored over the course of the experiment. The aim for the server were for the CPU not to go above 75% over the course of the experiment allowing the server to function appropriately. It was acceptable for the CPU to occasionally spike at this level for a short period of time, but it must return to a lower level. High CPU results from the server being stressed due to processes running such as compact, fixup or replication or from user load or any other third party programs.

· Domino Processes CPU: The previous metric monitors the overall CPU of the server, however, the CPU consumption of Domino specific processes were also monitored individually. In this manner the CPU consumption of Domino specific processes were evaluated.

· Server Memory: The server memory metric represents the amount of physical memory available on the server. If the available memory becomes low the server performance could be compromised.

· Server Disk I/O: The disk is a source of contention when a server is under load and performing a high number of read and write operations. The disk queue length was measured to determine if the disk I/O operations are resulting in a bottleneck for the system performance.

· Network I/O: These metrics monitor the network utilization to ensure the bandwidth consumption is acceptable and that the network is not overloaded.

· Response Times from the End-user Perspective: The server response times for user actions represent how long a single user must wait for a given transaction to complete. This metric captures the user experience of the application with the server. At times, response times were longer when a server was under load. When response times increase over an extended period, or persist at high levels (e.g. when a database or view takes longer than 30 seconds to open), they indicate that performance indicators are being hit and detailed analysis must be performed to determine the source of the slowdown and seek remediation.

· Open Session Response Times: In addition to monitoring the individual action response times, the Open session response times were also evaluated in order to ensure the server remains responsive over the course of the experiment.

2.2 Tools

In order to simulate user activity and capture the evaluation metrics discussed in section 2.1 a number of tools were used:

· Server.Load: The Server.Load is a capacity-planning tool that is used to run tests against a targeted Domino server to measure server capacity and response metrics.

· Domino showstats data: The Domino showstats captures important server metrics. A server.load client driver may be used to execute the showstats console command at regular intervals for each server in the configuration and will provide Domino-specific data. The resulting data is logged in a text file and may be graphed for analysis.

· Open session: The Open session tool measures mail file request/response times. It will open a view of a mail database at a set time interval and record the response time in milliseconds. As a result, a server slow down may be identified by analyzing the resulting response times.

· System performance meters: For the W64 2003: perfmon. For Solaris 10: perfmeter and for AIX 5.3 TPROF. This is used to graph the CPU Usage, Disk IO Utilization and Lan Utilization.

2.3 Evaluation Process

The server.load tool places a load on the Domino server. In order to simulate realistic load on the Domino server a total of six client drivers running server.load and server.load scripts were used. (One per DPAR)

The tests run were: SMTP/POP3, 8.5 mail (NRPC load) and 8.5 mail with Sametime.(NRPC and Sametime/buddylist load) All these scripts were run for 24 hours per day for 7 consecutive days. By the nature of the script, there was a ramp up and ramp down period of one hour. This replicates a real scenario within a company.

2.4 Scenario: Online Mode

The scenario evaluates the performance of Lotus Notes Clients in online mode. Online mode means that the user mail files are stored and maintained on the Domino server. Every time a user performs an action the request is sent to the server and the mail file is modified and updated on the server side.

N85Mail and N85Mail with Sametime Script with attachment size modification
Workload Actions	Action Count per hour per user current script	Action Count per 24 hour per user current script
Refresh inbox	4	96
Read Message	20	480
Reply to all	2	48
Send Message to one recipient	4	96
Send Message to three recipient	2	48
Create appointment	4	96
Send Invitation	4	96
Send RSVP	4	96
Move to folder	4	96
New Mail poll	4	96
Delete two documents	4	96
Total Messages sent	16	384
Total Transactions	52	1248

Table 1

Table 1 shows the action workload of the built in N85Mail and N85Mail with Sametime script with modifications to the attachment size. The script reflects the workload that is expected of a single user over the course of a day.

Message Distribution in N85Mail and N85Mail with Sametime Script
Message size distribution	Percent of messages sent	Attachment size ( if any )
0 < size <= 1k	5.9%	N/A
1k < size <= 10k	66%	N/A
10k < size <= 100k	25.0%	50 KB
100k < size <= 1mb	2.8%	N/A
1mb < size <= 10mb	.3%	10 MB

Table 2

The resulting mail distribution is shown in table 2. The POP3/SMTP workload has similar distribution to the figures in the above tables. However, exact profiling was not done for this script for the 8.5 release, and thus there is no table available at this time.

3 Test drivers

The server.load workload was generated by six “driver” workstations. In addition, there were two separate drivers utilized: One for a Lotus Notes Administration client and one for running statistics collection and monitoring delays in opening databases routinely on each Domino partitioned server. Also, a Sametime 8.0.1 server was present in the test configuration in order to run the mail 8.5 with Sametime load. This server was not under any explicit load and its performance was not measured.

4 Conclusion and Summary

The test results demonstrate that the IBM W64 2003 / AIX 5.3 / Solaris 10 System configured as described in this report was able to support up to 6000 concurrent, active Notes 8.5 users with an average response time below 2 seconds.

The addition of other application workloads will affect the number of users supported as well as the response time.

Achieving optimum performance in a customer environment is highly dependent upon selecting adequate processor power, memory and disk storage as well as balancing the configuration of that hardware and appropriately tuning the operating system and Domino software.

5 Machine details



6 Configuration settings

The following notes.ini variable was added to each of the Domino Servers:

DAOSDeferredDeleteInterval=30

This deletion of NLO files is known as “pruning” and occurs at the specified “Deferred Deletion Interval.”)

DAOSBasePath=DAOS

DAOS base path, if you leave it DAOS, and your data directory is C:\Lotus\Domino\Data, the full path to the repository would be C:\Lotus\Domino\Data\DAOS

DAOSMinObjSize=4096

The minimum size setting for an attachment to make use of DAOS is 4096 bytes.

DAOSEnable=1

Enabling DAOS

DAOS_CATALOG_VERSION=3

DAOS Catalog version to be set 3

DAOSCatalogState=2

state of the DAOS catalog

CREATE_R85_DATABASES=1

Enable ODS 51 as the default