Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The 8.0.2 Client Wackyness Continues, Kinda

When 8.0.2 launched a few weeks ago, I like many others in the Lotus community were real excited about it after hearing of all the performance enhancements that were promised in the release. The ability to have an almost instant starting full client was enough for any fanboy to look forward to it. But when the day hit and the downloads were done, the performance for some just wasn't there. Including me. The client was still slow to launch and when it would get past the splash screen most of the time it would continue to lock up and out would come the good old nsd -kill command to get you back to a starting point. So with all this frustration I broke down and put in a call to open a PMR today.
I know from following the blogsphere and Twitter that I'm not the only one having the issue and IBM is working on a solution for it, but still they can't find a central cause. One of the things that seems to be working for me right now is adding the following line to my notes.ini:
enable_early_authentication=0
While this line appears to be used for first time installs, as seen in this technote, it appears to help with the speed and stability of my client startup since putting it in this morning. Another thing that tech on the phone told me to look out for is the use of my anti-virius software. When set to scan Lotus Notes, another line is added in the notes.ini:
NSF_HOOKS=NLNVP
I've tried commenting the line out of the notes.ini but everytime I do, Symantec keeps adding it back it. Isn't that helpful! Not. So I'm working with the virus administrator to get the Lotus portion of the desktop client to stop scanning Notes. We'll see if that helps any. Stay tuned. Hopefully we can get this fixed so I can start rolling it out to more test subjects!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I could never figure out why people would setup Norton to scan inside Notes. Chances are it is scanning the OS and the server with the same definitions so why would it make any difference to scan inside Notes?

Vitor Pereira said...

Make sure you not only disable the plug-in that scans Notes databases but also add an exception to prevent the file system scan from scanning your notes folder.

Chris Whisonant said...

I completely second jim and vitor. You should NEVER have Norton's Notes mail scanning enabled. It causes major performance problems - especially with attachments. Ever notice or hear from users that opening emails is slow. If you have a message with an attachment, Symantec actually will download and scan the attachment BEFORE allowing you to be shown the preview or opening the document. Then if you want to open the attachment you have to download it again. Very bad for performance.

Again, make your AV admins correct this. While you're at it, make sure that the c:\program files\lotus and c:\program files\ibm\lotus folders are excluded from AV scanning. And make sure that all of the Domino program and data directories are excluded if there is an OS-level AV client on any of your Domino servers.

Again, allow me to reiterate this - force these people to make these changes!!! (Was that clear enough?) :)

Mo said...

Wow...this seems to have improved the 8.0.2 startup quite a bit. Do you any of you guys know of any potential issues cropping up by using the ENABLE_EARLY_AUTHENTICATION line in notes.ini? Thanks guys, will save a lot of frustration on the part of my users.