Wednesday 24 April 2013

Designer keep crashing? Unable to delete apps? Notes client really slow? Something to try.

As a Domino Administrator with a smidge of Design skill I am constantly using all three Notes clients during my working day. Over recent weeks, I have found my Notes 8.5.3 client getting slower and slower and some other issues which were more worrying, such as:

  • Unable to delete Notes applications either from Local or from a server. (Notes just crashed).
  • Opening Designer crashed Notes immediately.
I tried the following to fix it:
  •  Installed FP3.
  • Offline compact, fixup and updall against the entire data directory.
  • Ensured that ODS was updated to version 51 on all system databases.
  • Uninstall / Re-install the application (after a registry sweep to ensure all gremlins were gone).
  • Disable all client add-ins (there was just one).
I found a few forum threads and blog posts which suggested that the bookmark.nsf might be "corrupted" so I thought I'd focus on that.

(Corrupted is a word which gets used far too often in Notes world in my view! If the file were really corrupted, I wouldn't be able to use the thing at all, right? I'm pretty sure I'd struggle to find a dictionary definition for "corrupted" meaning "kinda works sometimes").

So I renamed bookmark.nsf to oldbookmark.nsf. On restarting the client a new bookmark.nsf was spawned (you need a bookmark.ntf in your data directory if that doesn't happen for you) and suddenly my issues went away.

What have I lost by doing this? Actually, not much. Here's what I found:
  • My client preferences were retained.
  • My Domino Administrator server bookmarks and domains were retained.
  • My Domino Designer bookmarks were retained.
  • My workspace icons were retained.
but...
  • My homepage was lost (I was only using the default anyway - no big deal).
  • The links in my "Open" list (I had links to my Traveler.nsf and a couple of spreadsheets there) were lost.
So, I've lost very little, but gained a client which works at an acceptable speed, with very little data loss.

I highly recommended this to anyone else who has been suffering from the same issue!

3 comments:

  1. My biggest issue with the Notes Client and Designer stemmed from the corporate anti-virus system. It monitored every bit of disk activity along with all network traffic. It was only when I removed the installed .dll out of the notes.ini that I recovered some speed back again.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've also have that problem in the past. Lotus Notes client doesn't play nicely with McAfee, for example. It always makes sense to restrict AV and desktop searching products from accessing Notes\Data directories.

      Delete
    2. I wasn't going to name names, but since you've already done so, yes it's McAfee which is the right royal pain in the .ini file.

      Delete