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How fragmented are your Domino Server Drives on Windows - Help needed!

Disk fragmentation has been discussed here more than once and defragmentation is part of the ideal Notes upgrade and the Upgrade Cheat Sheet. In a comment Nico57 points out that the disk allocation scheme of Domino is a huge contributor, especially when compact -c is part of your database hygiene routines.
The irony of compact: your inner structures in the NSF will be squeaky clean, but the content will be (after a while) splattered over your disk like pimples on a teenager's face. The least you can do is to point all temp locations at least onto a different partition. So I had a chat with the engineering team and they are interested to learn about the magnitude of the problem. So I need your help. We like to know how fragmented your NSF on your Windows servers really are. This is what I want you to do:
  1. Download a copy of Sysinternals Contig.exe from Microsoft Technet and make it accessible from your Windows server (Copy it there, put it on a network drive you can reach, you know what you are doing)
  2. Open a command prompt on your server and type [Wherever-contig-is]\contig -a -s [Path-to-Domino-data-directory]\*.nsf > fragmentation.txt If you have database or directory links you have to repeat the process but then you need >> fragmentation.txt. This will list out the files and their fragmentation. Don't forget the -a parameter that tells contig to list only and not to actually defrag
  3. Find the database with the most fragments as well as the average number of fragments (that number is at the very end of a run). I would like to know these figures
  4. Head over to the Entry form and let me know. There are only 2 numeric values mandatory (and the selection of two dropdowns), the rest is strictly optional. Leave an eMail address if it is OK to contact you with a question or two.
  5. Leave a comment here (optional) if you have a question or would like to share special procedures or experiences.
Your contribution is really appreciated!

Posted by on 14 March 2011 | Comments (9) | categories: Show-N-Tell Thursday

Comments

  1. posted by Stephan H. Wissel on Tuesday 15 March 2011 AD:
    @Eric The documentation says -s should traverse subdirectories (try contig contig -help for full parameter explanation). I just tried contig -s -a c:\Notes\Data\*.nsf and it worked the sub directories.
    Emoticon tongue.gif stw
  2. posted by ursus schneider on Tuesday 15 March 2011 AD:
    Hallo Stephan

    I have just inherited a configuration of 5 servers here in Austria - the servers where is such bad nick that I reinstalled all of them (2 x AS/400, 3 x Windows) so the fragmentation is low. Should you still need/want my info please drop me a line.

    BTW: I was at your lectures / talks at the edcom Nachlese - good job :o)

    cu
    Ursus
  3. posted by Erik Brooks on Tuesday 15 March 2011 AD:
    Excellent, Stephan. We'll post our results soon. We have many servers running SSDs though, where fragmentation is handled by the drive itself and in many cases intentional. They're not interested in that data, correct?
  4. posted by Stephan H. Wissel on Tuesday 15 March 2011 AD:
    @Eric: Yes SSD don't have a delay due to head positioning, so I guess fragmentation doesn't have much effect on the performance. The magnetic results would be good enough.
    ... and an interesting thought: combat fragmentation by switching media.
    Emoticon cool.gif stw
  5. posted by kenio carvalho on Tuesday 15 March 2011 AD:
    I use dominodefrag from OpenNTF.It's use contig.exe too.
    Another good thing: put your log.nsf in another disk.
  6. posted by Eric Mack on Tuesday 15 March 2011 AD:
    Happy to help. I ran the utility on 3 servers but it only picked up files in the DATA dire and not my sub dirs (e.g. MAIL, web, etc.)

    Is there an alternate syntac that will scan ALL folders in the DATA dir? If so, I would be happy to run this again for you.

    Like Kenio, I also use DominoDefrag - seems to work well, but I have not done it in a while so the fragemnt report may be helpful to you.

    Eric
  7. posted by Adam Osborne on Wednesday 16 March 2011 AD:
    Without taking active steps your fragmentation levels are going to be bad. That's why we made Defrag.NSF.

    As a long term IBM Business partner we have spent years on this topic and blogged extensively about it, to the point where we feel we are SMEs on the topic.

    If you want more details about how bad your fragmentation is by using Notes and Domino native tools, and how to fix it, try Defrag.NSF for free.
    { Link }

  8. posted by Andrew Luder on Thursday 17 March 2011 AD:
    Get absolutely free DominoDefrag (uses contig.exe 1.60) from { Link } and load on your Windows Domino server with Notes INI option DominoDefrag_VerboseLogging=1 and check log.nsf to get before and after results to submit
  9. posted by Rob Novak on Friday 18 March 2011 AD:
    I recently noticed on a support client's Quickr Domino servers (we support Quickr and Domino and the custom apps, they do the hardware) that Windows defrag had likely never been run across the entire environment - 12 servers - some of them running for 4-5 years. Guess what? 96% file fragmentation.

    I strongly suggested a staged defrag, they tried, but with 0.4% complete in 36 hours it was impossible. So I've had to put it into an upgrade plan to wipe the databases, stage their upgrade on alternate servers, defrag while most of the data is gone and then trust Windows to copy over the upgraded places more cleanly. Finally, get them on a schedule!