Maintenance tasks
After seeing a recent spate of issues caused by scheduled tasks run on the Domino server, it would be a good idea to review what maintenance tasks you should--and more importantly, what you shouldn't--run on a regular basis.
The most commonly misused task is Fixup. In simple terms, this utility marks inconsistencies in a database and, in the case of documents, purges them immediately. It is not recommended that this be run on a scheduled basis as it is not preventative maintenance. Running fixup will correct existing problems, but it does not make it less likely that future corruption will occur. Fixup should be run when there is evidence of corruption or when directed by Support.
Updall is a recommended maintenance task, but it is often scheduled with the -R option, which causes a full rebuild of view indexes. This is unnecessary unless you see specific indications of index corruption. In all other cases, using Updall -R simply consumes more server resources without any additional benefit. Updall (no options) is scheduled by default at 2:00 AM via the notes.ini ServerTasksAt2 parameter, and this will only refresh indexes to make them current. This is far less taxing than a full rebuild and is sufficient in almost all cases.
Compact is another recommended maintenance task, and it has the greatest amount of flexibility based on the environment. The recommended options for Compact are -b or -B. The lower-case variety will reorganize whitespace within the database but will not release unused space to the operating system. The advantage here is that whitespace will be available to store new documents without having to request additional disk space from the operating system, which is a performance improvement. The upper-case variety will release unused storage to the operating system, which is useful when disk space is the overriding concern. However, new documents will require additional disk allocation from the operating system, which is a performance hit. (Note that servers using transaction logging should run compact with the -b (lower-case) option to avoid making unnecessary backups.)
Chad Scott | 18 June 2007 07:01:13 AM ET | Austin, TX | Comments (5)
