Domino on S/390 Sucks

Possible alternative post titles:
"Domino Sucks on OS/390"
"Domino Rocks on Blade Server"
"Domino Rocks on W2K3"

Okay, to be fair maybe I shouldn't make such a blanket statement. Let me qualify it a bit more. Domino in the S/390 environment that we run in sucks.

We have had performance issues on the S/390 from the beginning. We thought we were rockin when we moved to ZFS as the performance improved greatly. The data center has never taken the advice of IBM/Lotus to put Domino in it's own LPAR, so there is a chance that performance could be better, but I don't know that it would be on par with the results that we have gotten out of Windows 2003 on a blade server.

One of our developer's came up with a database that we were able to use to measure performance. It gave us results that we could compare against when making configuration tweaks and ultimately getting to ZFS. Now we have been able to run that database again in the two environments. The only load on either of the servers (S/390 and W2K3) was the performance database itself. No users hitting it and no other applications running on the Domino Servers. The results even from the partial day graphed below speak for themselves. The lowest combined total time in the S/390 environment was 10 seconds with a high of 37 seconds. On the blade server the performance times never wavered from 2 seconds.

The Database Search retrieves 955 documents. The Document Collection Loop goes through the 955 documents from the DB Search. The interval to run was set at 5 minutes.

Given these results, which environment would you prefer to run in?

We hope that having these figures will help us in our pursuit to move from the S/390 environment.

Domino S/390 Performance

Blade Server Performance

By the way, it is an IBM Blade Server, so as much as I am bashing IBM, I am also promoting IBM.