Paul Mooney: Speed improvement loading Notes 852

June 6 2010

Paul is part of the design partner program, and as with other beta participants, has been given the early run to start talking about Notes 8.5.2 in advance of its planned Q3 release.  Several of you will find his post good news.  He shows an improvement of 10% or more in the cold start time vs. 8.5.1, which is even better than 8.0.1 or 8.0.2.  The warm start is a mere matter of seconds, as fast as a browser or any other app.

Links: Cold start >
Warm start >

I've been in a few meetings recently with customers who are very frustrated with the Notes 8 startup time, still, after a bunch of work that has gone into the maintenance releases.  I don't want to go too far into one customer specifics, but in one case, perceptions and reality are not aligned.  I think it's important to do more videos like Paul's, though I'd like to see a "typical" Windows one -- Macs may be common in the community, but some customers still want to see what the results will be in their environment.  Either way, we're at a point where the startup time is reasonable on a reasonable (doesn't have to be 2010 latest and greatest) machine, depending entirely on what else is going on in the environment (which is true of any software program).

Link: Paul Mooney: Speed improvement loading Notes 852 >

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  notesdomino 8.5  Add/View Comments [11]

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  1. 1  Erik Brooks  | 6/6/2010 9:46:08 AM

    Your "Warm Start" link is broken, Ed. It should be:

    { Link }

    That 8.5.2 warm start time in particular, though, is absolutely 100% acceptable in my book. Good job! If only SSDs had started to become popular 3-4 years ago...

  1. 2  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/6/2010 9:57:02 AM

    Fixed.

    I have heard SSDs have a hugely-positive impact on the Notes client startup time. I realize they're not mainstream yet, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on as they are more-widely deployed.

  1. 3  Mark Hughes http://hughesconnect.com | 6/6/2010 2:55:17 PM

    I just got a new laptop with an SSD, it is a great improvement, but also just installed 8.5.2 cd5 so maybe its a combinations of things.

  1. 4  John Turnbow http://www.recondite2.com | 6/6/2010 3:47:36 PM

    Startup and resource usage are two different things. What is the total resource usage and does this mean anthing better when running in a Citrix environment?

  1. 5  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 6/6/2010 5:48:21 PM

    @John, it probably does have some impact on resource usage. Much of the performance improvement comes from deferring component load until the component is actually requested. So if you don't open the integrated Sametime client, for instance, then hardly any of the realtime packages are run. I have a Notes 8.5.2 client instance that's been running on my laptop now for about 3 days, and the combined tasks are consuming about 94MB of RAM. That's dramatically down from the 240+ MB I would see with 8.0.0.

    Of course, there's always room for more improvement. Even dramatic improvement when you consider how much client performance is dependent on the Java APIs these days, and just how much room for improvement there is in the lotus.domino.local package. So hopefully future versions will show improvements not just in initial load time, but operation time as well.

  1. 6  Bill Geimer  | 6/6/2010 10:57:57 PM

    Even 8.5.1 hf2 boots faster the Outlook 2007 most of the time.

  1. 7  Andreas Ricke  | 6/8/2010 3:32:02 PM

    Here are some more details for 8.5.2 CD5 vs. 8.5.1 FP3 on Windows 7 and Windows XP.

    { Link }

  1. 8  MarvinK  | 6/8/2010 6:57:13 PM

    I'd be interested in seeing some unbiased side-by-side videos comparing Outlook and Notes startup time. We ended up deploying the basic client because of the unacceptable startup times with 8.5.1--but we're certainly holding out for improved performance in 8.5.2 and beyond.

    15-20 second startup times aren't anything worth writing home about :/

  1. 9  Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 6/9/2010 7:57:44 AM

    When I get my hands on one of these "hybrid" SSD's { Link } that are much, much cheaper than regular SSD's I'll have a detailed review.

  1. 10  Christian Henseler  | 6/9/2010 10:11:03 AM

    See John Head's blog posting about Lotus Notes 8.5.2 CD5 vs MS Outlook 2010 startup performance.

    I've done tests on a Windows 7 64 Bit, 4 GB RAM, 100 GB SATA (no SSD) with 32 Bit MS Outlook2010 vs Lotus Notes 8.5.2CD5 Standard Client.

    Lotus Notes cold start time was 9-11 Secs, MS Outlook 20010 7-8 secs.

    While MS Outlook is Mail only, Lotus Notes 8.5.2 is far more than Mail, so it might be better to compare Lotus Notes 8.5.2 Basic client rather than Standard client.