Type2 IFS Directories and Domino

Hey, Ted:

I read with interest your article "Type2 IFS Directories," which published in the October 23, 2002 issue of Midrange Guru, and I also read Jeff Parker's "Get Ready to Boost Your IFS Performance with V5R2," which published in the August 29, 2002 issue of The Four Hundred. I am running Domino, which, as you know, uses the IFS on a V5R1 system, and I was wonder whether upgrading my IFS to Type2 directories will have a positive effect on day-to-day Domino performance. What benefits, if any, would I see to Domino by changing my IFS directories to Type2 under V5R1?

-- Roger

I had to refer your question to Jeff Parker, who works on the Integrated File System at IBM Rochester. Here is his response:

"Thanks for your questions about *TYPE2 directories. We don't have specific data regarding the *TYPE2 directory performance improvement for Domino. In general, the performance improvement is most significant when there are significant numbers of directories involved in your operations or when applications perform a lot of directory-related operations, such as creating or reading directories and deleting small. I would expect that the Domino portion of your file system has many more files than directories, and that most of the file system activity centers around the files. Thus, my expectation is that your performance may not change significantly."

"As you read in the article, there are other benefits beyond performance. The most significant is reliability. Recovery after a power outage or a system crash is very solid with *TYPE2 directories. Not that *TYPE1 directories are bad . . . they are just more exposed to crash-related problems than *TYPE2 directories are."

"It looks like you have done your homework about the conversion process. Note that the actual time to perform the conversion is typically 30 percent to 50 percent of the estimated time, due to multi-threading."

Good luck, Roger. Please let us know how it goes.

-- Ted

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