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This guide provides a high-level overview, background information, and best practice recommendations on Lotus Sametime's Name Lookup solution.
Introduction
One of the most heavily used features of the Lotus Sametime server is the Sametime Resolve (STResolve) service that provides name lookup and resolution. At a very basic level, the STResolve service facilitates the most common and necessary end-user functions like authentication, user searching, and online awareness. Thus it is essential that you take careful consideration in how you plan your environment. Improper planning or configuration can result in very poor performance of Sametime's Name Lookup solution, thus resulting in a very poor user experience. This information guide is designed to provide you with the most up-to-date information about how to plan and configure your environment for the best possible experience for your organization.
Symptoms of poor Name Lookup performance
How does poor performance of Sametime's Name Lookup solution manifest itself? You will know immediately when Sametime's Name Lookup solution is not performing very well within your organization. Your users will tell you they cannot do anything within Sametime, such as:
- Unable to log into Sametime or it is taking a very long time to log in.
- Unable to add contacts or groups
- Unable to use quickfind to find people or groups
- Inconsistent awareness within the Lotus Notes Inbox or Notes applications (for example, the address book)
- Inconsistent awareness within web-based applications integrated with Sametime (Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, WebSphere Portal, and so on)
- Notes client process spikes to 100% utilization, and logging off from Sametime in the Notes client returns the CPU on the Notes process to normal
- Opening a chat session with another client shows the message "Initializing chat: Resolving User Name". This is an organization-wide outage
- Sametime business card may be missing information or otherwise not display properly
On the server, the following symptoms might appear:
- On IBM i operating system (iSeries), the STMux task might terminate abnormally
- The Sametime Resolve task remains at high CPU utilization or might terminate abnormally
When multiple reports of the symptoms above occur, then you should consider implementing IBM's best practices as outlined in this guide.
Components of the name lookup solution
Sametime's Name Lookup solution is comprised of four main components (see illustration below):
- Client(s)
- Sametime server(s)
- LDAP Directory Server(s)
- Network
Each component is part of the overall Name Lookup solution. Thus it is necessary to inspect each component individually to ensure that each component is configured and set up properly for Sametime to provide an efficient, speedy, and optimized Name Lookup solution. This illustration shows you each component of your specific solution that you should inspect individually.
Optimization strategy
When reviewing each of the components, you should be perform the review in this order, as shown above:
1. Client
2. Sametime server
3. Directory server
4. Network
The strategy is to filter out as many unnecessary requests as possible early in the process, then optimize the requests that are legitimate. Reducing the number of requests generated on the client reduces the STResolve queue length on the Sametime server. Changes on the Sametime server can decrease the number of name lookup requests that have to be sent to the LDAP Directory server and in turn the number of requests that the LDAP server needs to process. Addressing any network problems can prevent bottlenecks that affect performance.
Let's look at an example. Here are some of the strings that might be submitted to the STResolve service:
String | Description |
John Doe/Example | Notes name |
johndoe@example.com | Email addresses for internal user |
janedoe@hotmail.com | External email address |
Jo | Extremely short string in quickfind |
John | Given name, surname, or other strings entered by the user |
Certain types of requests, such as those containing an external email address, can immediately be classified as non-resolvable (unless the Sametime Gateway is used in the organization). Search strings that are extremely short and return a large number of results should also be discarded. The key to optimizing is to realize as many efficiencies as possible by identifying patterns or adjusting components to handle the name lookup load.
The pages linked below discuss each of the components in more detail and the optimization strategy for each.
Resources
As a complement to this guide, review the following resources:
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