Introduction

IBM® Notes® Traveler provides automatic, two-way, over-the-air syncing between IBM Domino® servers and wireless handheld devices, including Android devices, Windows™ Mobile devices, Nokia S60 Third Edition devices, Nokia S60 Fifth Edition devices, Nokia Symbian^3 devices, and select mobile devices running the Exchange ActiveSync protocol, such as Apple, Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 devices.

IBM Notes Traveler syncs mail, calendar and address book data in real time. On some select clients, To Do and Journal data are also synchronized. The Notes Traveler server runs as a Domino server task and is installed on a server running IBM Domino. The Notes Traveler server task uses the Domino directory to look up Notes users.

Testing

Setup

We use the following hardware for our testing:
• Power 740 8205-E6B
• a Storwize V7000 with 24x 10K 360GB disk units.
• 2 Hosting VIOS partitions with 8GB FC connection to the Storwize V7000. Each VIOS LPAR has 1 CPU dedicated 4GB Memory

Standalone mode test configuration was as shown on figure 1 and as outlined in table 1.

Figure 1. Test configuration


Table 1. Test configuration hardware and software

Function	CPU	Memory	Storage	Software	Quantity
Mail Server Power 740 LPAR	4 core 3.6 GHz	32 GB	800 GB	Domino 9.0.0 on IBM i 7.1	1
Traveler Server Power 740 LPAR	2 core 3.6 GHz	16 GB	500 GB	Traveler 9.0.0.1 and Domino 9.0.0 on IBM i 7.1	1

Test Methodology

The test strategy was to simulate a typical enterprise-customer messaging load and then add mobile devices to that environment. The IBM Notes Server.Load workload generators simulated Notes client activity by sending mail to random users in the test set and causing other activity on the Domino mail server.

We added mobile devices into this mix, using the device simulators, which keep the changes generated by Server.Load in sync with the client and simulate mobile-user actions on the device.

The performance of the Notes Traveler server and the Domino Mail server were measured by using of the Notes Traveler and Server.Load N85Mail workloads on IBM i 7.1 servers.

Notes Traveler servers were exercised by test systems that simulated mobile device clients. These driver systems simulated remote devices reading and sending mail messages using HTTP (not HTTPS).

Here are the details the IBM Notes Traveler client script:
There are 64 iterations of this loop with a 15-min wait between iterations. Each user starts on a random iteration count (1st, 5th, etc.), and each user runs for the entire 64 iterations:

Loop start
 OPEN/READ five Inbox mails (every iteration)
 Reply to the first mail (every 2nd iteration)
 SEND one 10-byte mail to one person (every 8th iteration)
 SEND another 10-byte mail to three people (every 8th iteration)
 MOVE one mail from the Inbox to the NotesBench folder (every iteration)
 DELETE two mails (every iteration)
Loop end

In addition to the user scripts above, the Notes Traveler clients are listening for auto-sync (push) messages from the Notes Traveler server. If mail or calendar data is changed on the server as a result of the NotesBench load drivers, then the Notes Traveler client will automatically synchronize the server changes to the device.

The load driver for Notes Traveler simulates Windows Mobile (WM) 6, Nokia, Apple and Android devices. Windows Mobile, Nokia, and Android devices use HTTP-based auto sync, whereas Apple devices use the Exchange ActiveSync synchronization protocol and have different performance characteristics than the WM, Nokia, and Android devices.

For Notes Traveler 9.0.0.1, a mixed workload with 35% Android devices, 5% Windows phone devices 60% Apple devices was used.

Domino mail server workload

The N85Mail workload that was run on the IBM Domino 9.0.0 mail server simulated users sending mail using an IBM Notes client. This workload is part of a NotesBench workload suite that is part of the tools NotesBench and Server.Load (included as an installation option in the administrator client). For more information about the details of the N85Mail workload, refer to the developerWorks® article, “IBM Lotus Notes V8 workloads: Taking performance to a new level.”

For these measurements, the N85Mail workload simulated 4,000 IBM Notes clients sending mail to up to 7000 users (4000 plus the number of mobile device users). The additional users(up to 3,000) were the IBM Notes Traveler registered users. These measurements simulate a customer environment in which mail users have either an IBM Notes client or an IBM Notes Traveler device, but not both at the same time.

DISCLAIMER: All our tests are lab measurements; therefore the results may differ from real customer environments. For assistance with capacity planning, we recommend consultation with the IBM TechLine team.

Domino mail server configuration parameters

Table 1 lists the software configuration for the Domino mail server.

Table 2. Software configuration

Notes.ini settings
Used for all tests	server_pool_tasks=200 server_max_concurrent_trans=200 Server_Show_Performance=1 RouterDbCacheSize=6100 NSF_DBcache_maxentries=6000 SCHEDULE_NO_VALIDATE=1

The mail server is running Domino Server 9.0.0 set up as a single Domino partition server using settings in table 2.

Traveler server configuration parameters

IBM Notes Traveler Server 9.0.0.1 was set up using settings in table 3.

Table 2 shows the software configuration for the Notes Traveler Server . The Notes Traveler server must be tuned for the number of active users that it supports. The settings we changed for this test are indicated in the table. For more details, refer to the “Tuning performance of the server” topic in the Notes Traveler 9.0.0 product documentation.

Table 3. Software configuration for Notes Traveler Server

settings
HTTP threads	1.2* number of devices

Results

The following figures show system resource utilization for Notes Traveler Server 9.0.0.1 on IBM i at different simulated device loads in a standalone configuration.
Figure 2 shows the CPU resource utilization for Traveler server and Mail server

Figure 2. CPU Utilization for Traveler Server and Mail Server

Figure 3 shows the base pool page fault for Traveler server and Mail server.

Figure 3. Page Fault for Traveler Server and Mail Server


Figure 4 shows physical DISK I/O usage for Traveler server and Mail server.

Figure 4. Physical DISK I/O usage for Traveler Server and Mail Server

Figure 5 shows the network usage for Traveler server and Mail server.

Figure 5. Network usage for Traveler Server and Mail Server

Conclusion

The performance measurements of the IBM Notes Traveler 9.0.0.1 in our configuration demonstrated that the Traveler servers in standalone configuration is able to support up to 3,000 devices.

Resources

IBM Notes and Domino Wiki:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf

Traveler wiki document: “Configuring IBM Notes Traveler High Availability pool on IBM i”
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/xpDocViewer.xsp?lookupName=Administering+IBM+Notes+Traveler+9#action=openDocument&res_title=Configuring_the_IBM_Notes_Traveler_High_Availability_pool_on_IBM_i_A9&content=pdcontent

Traveler wiki document: “IBM Notes Traveler 9.0 in High-Availability Configuration Performance”
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/IBM_Notes_Traveler_9.0_in_High-Availability_Configuration_Performance

Traveler wiki document: “IBM Notes Traveler 9.0.0.1 in High-Availability Configuration Performance on IBM i”
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/IBM_Notes_Traveler_9.0.0.1_in_High-Availability_Configuration_Performance_on_IBM_i

Appendix 1: Notes.ini settings

Notes.Ini parameter name	Explanation
NSF_Dbcache_Maxentries	Specifies the number of databases that a server can hold in its database cache at one time
RouterDbCacheSize	Specifies the size of Router Database cache used to cache mail databases in the router process.
SCHEDULE_NO_VALIDATE	Enables or disables whether SchedMgr validates its busytime database entry on a daily basis, as follows: 0 (default) - Enables validation 1 - Disables validation
Server_MAX_CONCURRENT_TRANS	Sets the limit for the number of concurrently scheduled transactions on a server
Server_Pool_Tasks	Total number of physical threads in the Domino server (DbServer) threadpool.
Server_Show_Performance	Applies to servers. Specifies whether or not server performance events are displayed on the console. Set this variable to 1 to display server performance events on console.

About the authors

Chen, Yong Ze is an Advisory Software Engineer working for IBM i Domino and Traveler. You can reach him at yongzech@cn.ibm.com