Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
Notes 8 Performance Improvements on Linux Worth the Upgrade/Migration Alone
Notes 8 as a client on Linux is ridiculously fast – and I don’t have one of the bleeding edge laptops here. The early alpha I used was full of bugs and had all the debug code running. This beta is definitely not slow and it hands down outperforms Notes 6.5 on Windows in speed. Add in that it looks better, has better organization/customizations, and has a built-in SameTime plugin… quite a package. The RSS feed plugin needs some presentation work, but it’s nice to see it there. One of these days I’m going to time my morning bootup from start button to able to send an email in Notes/Windows and compare that to booting with Notes/Linux to give you a feel for the pain/frustration I go through every time I restart into Windows.
I actually cut over to RHEL5 Desktop (IBM’s latest Open Client offering) last night to get on a supported Notes OS and keep up with the latest releases. I’m quite impressed with the look, feel, and performance of RHEL5 Desktop. It’s FAR better than the RHEL4 WS (shudder) and I’m impressed enough so far to say it may just be better than SLED as well. I shouldn’t knock RHEL4 WS – it has been around forever, and it does what it was designed for well. It’s tough to say “it’s better” knowing SP1 for SLED is on the way with new improvements, but for a first release, RHELD is definitely nice. I’m not sure yet what happens to the pkg mgmt when you mix in the bleeding edge Fedora repos, but you can be sure I’ll find out soon. That’s one area where Gentoo excels and I have yet to find a distro to keep up – Ubuntu is the closest if you want my opinion, but .. try installing Beryl 0.2 on Feisty… see what I mean.
Yesterday over on #redmonk I got the news that yet another beta tester tried to run it on Ubuntu… unfortunately that is not one of the beta platforms supported. If you’re using Ubuntu and want to try it out, I’d suggest running the beta on RHEL/SLES in VMWare on Ubuntu. It won’t be the ideal experience, but that’s one way to get it working. I’ll ask around and see if there any .deb’s in the IBM locker for the beta…
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March 27th, 2007 at 12:43 am
DanKegel said:
So, how does the performance compare
to running Notes 7 as a client on Linux
via Wine?
To make the test interesting, reboot your
computer and tell it to only use 256MB of RAM,
measure how long it takes to complete
common activities with Notes 7 on Wine
and Notes 8 native, both on Linux.
e.g. how long does it take to get from
when you tell the OS to start Notes
to when Notes asks you for your username?
I bet the Windows version on Wine will
run faster and use less memory, but I’m
just guessing here…
If you haven’t tried Notes in Wine, it works
pretty well now, no fiddling needed.
( See http://wiki.winehq.org/LotusNotes for
details. )
March 27th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
md said:
Notes under Wine ;-) brings back memories … doesn’t even compare in terms of usability and OS integration in my opinion. The last time I used Notes under Wine it was a mess. It worked, but saving files/dirs was an odd battle not to mention the ever so subtle wine crash that took everything down. I must admit though, the last Notes/Wine setup I used was Notes 6 and it seems you’ve had a good experience with 7/wine.
I can’t really compare it as you suggest as I don’t have Notes 7/Windows to install… could probably find it if I looked and badgered our tech support people, but it’s not at hand.
Why do you suggest running with only 256MB? I assume you’re inferring something about the Eclipse RCP/Expeditor overhead? I have 1GB right now… most configs these days do as well…
If you’re running Notes 7 on Wine right now, it would be easy to just download the beta and try this test
You’re probably the first person to say they prefer Linux/wine which I find curious and cool at the same time. I just never got the Wine implementation to work well… but admittedly it’s been over a year since I tried it.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
md said:
BTW, my comments in the post were more directed at comparing Notes8/Linux against Notes 6.5/Windows which I can dual boot into.
April 3rd, 2009 at 3:20 am
Patrick Kwinten said:
are there any comparison figures available?
…as a client. this also includes the Domino designer ? (or is that not available for Linux)