Rainer Brandl

Lotus Notes – Thanks for the memory….


Source: IBM developerWorks

A great article about how to speed up your IBM Notes Client :

No, this is not a pre-announcement of the death of Lotus Notes. Nope, what this is is something that came out of a discussion we were having on a residency that I am running about some whizzy new hardware that will be announced very shortly. While I was waiting for what seemed like an eternity for Lotus Notes to wake up and open itself, one of the residents said “have you upped the JVM memory setting?”. What, says I in my best I haven’t got a clue what you are talking about expression.
So, a few clicks later and a restart of Lotus Notes (in my case LN 8.5) and the thing is now like an express train ! Naturally your mileage may vary, but it don’t half go a bit quicker for me now ! It’s not going to fix network issues, but everything opens much quicker.
Here is a part of the solution described there.
Resolving the problem
Most likely, a set of default configurations for Notes/Designers’ use of the JVM needs to be modified. The JVM is the runtime upon which Java programs execute. For Notes and Domino Designer, the JVM settings are stored in a file called jvm.properties that is located in the following path:
/framework/rcp/deploy/jvm.properties
By default, the properties file has the following values:
    vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx256m
    vmarg.Xms=-Xms48m
    vmarg.Xmca=-Xmca8k

If you have at least 2 GB of physical RAM, close all instances of Notes, Domino Designer, and Domino Administrator, and then change the settings to the following values:
    vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx1024m
    vmarg.Xms=-Xms512m
    vmarg.Xmca=-Xmca512k

NOTE: In a post Notes/Designer 9.0 release, these higher values will be set by default in new installs, but currently you must change them manually.
Back to me again. Now, do not get too greedy as I did and change the values to something other than those advised. I did, and Lotus Notes was not very happy about it and seemed to spend an inordinate time loading. Going back to the suggested values fixed that.
Hopefully you will notice an improvement !

3 comments

  1. Wait… let me get this straight… One IBM Technote says one thing, and a different IBM Technote (discussion) says something else?
    IBM Technotes = AWESOME!

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  3. according to sources I don't have a link to right now, you should keep the Xms part at around 128m. The reasoning (insofar I can retrieve from my analog memory) is that hitting the limit somewhere during startup compresses and packs some static allocations, Which leaves more space in the rest of the heap later on (a.k.a defragmenting the free list). The compressing and packing operations are cheaper to perform when the heap is smaller.
    Ah, found one of my sources: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27013824
    Java Garbage Collection Best Practices for Sizing and Tuning the Java Heap
    by Chris Bailey
    While reading, keep in mind that the JVM that the eclipse parts of Notes runs in use XgcPolicy:gencon

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