Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : HTTP Performance Testing (R5 vs R6). Wow, R6 is having some serious problems...

Greetings,

I've been doing some extensive testing between R5.0.11 and R6.0. One item that I've noticed is that R6 web performance is quite slow as compared to R5.

Let me tell you about my test environment:

I have to identical (hardware and OS) machines each running W2K server. I built the two machines at the exact same time and every OS variable is exactly the same (except for the IP address). I have PC Anywhere running on each machine and I have tested the upload download speed on each system via PC Anywhere and the performances are the same.

I have installed R5.0.11 on one machine and R6 on another. The installs were basic and I did not not change any of the defaults.

Test Scenario 1 (Default Tests): I copied a 200Kb image into each of their HTML directories. I then used a website (http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/rs_start.html) to test the download speed of each of the servers. The R5 server would give 500-550Kb/Sec download speed and the R6 would consistenly give 300-320Kb/Sec. I tried downloading larger files from the HTML directory and timed their download speeds...and the results were basically the same: R5 was 75%-100% faster.

The reason I placed the files/images in the HTML directory is because I wanted to remove all other Domino elements (Agmr, NLNotes, etc...) out of the equation. If I place the images in a database and test the download speed, the results are the same: R5 is about 75% to 100% faster.

Test Scenario 2 (Tweaks): So, of course I thought there might be some default settings that might cause the servers to perform differently. I checked everything from the DNS Lookup and Binding to Hosts to Logging. My results: R5 was still 75%-100% faster.

Test Scenario 3 (Cheating Tweaks): I tried copying the server doc from the R5 server to the R6 and changed the IP address and server name information. Everything else was the same. I did this because I thought I might be missing something. Same results: R5 was still 75%-100% faster.

Test Scenario 4 (Upgrade R5 to R6): After copying back the original server doc I upgraded the R5 server to R6...and guess what: the HTTP download performance dropped and I began having the same performance as the other R6 server.

I would like to note one thing: I tested the Notes performance via the Notes client (i.e. replication, opening views, opening docs, etc...) and performance is basically the same for each server.

Does anyone have an answer for what I'm seeing? I see there are other postings that mention the same issue. Is this a recognized issue with Lotus? Have they seen the same thing? Is it being addressed in the next point release?

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-j