HCL Notes and Domino 9.0 Social Edition Forum - When need to activate transaction log

Sep 15, 2014, 12:50 PM

7 Posts

Transaction logging

It is recommended to have the transaction logging directory located on a separate drive.
Transaction logging should have their own separate drive to avoid issues.

Here's a document regarding transaction logging.
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27003543

You can also open a PMR to better understand why transaction logging should be on a separate drive.

~Ted Bregerolyobu

Sep 15, 2014, 2:58 PM

2 Posts

Re: When need to activate transaction log

Thanks,

I know this information from link provided.

And also information from Notes/Domino Best Practices: Transaction Logging, but there is not clear if, in small setup, it's ok to run on same disk/partition.

The information presented there is assumed using transaction logging on servers with thousand users/databases which is not case here.

I asked here to find if anyone has experience running transaction logging on this type of setup.

~Tip Ekresaman

Sep 15, 2014, 3:29 PM

212 Posts

Transaction Logging

You can enable transaction logging at any time. The recommendation to place the Transaction logging directory on another drive is an effort to ensure that if there is problem with your primary drive, the transaction logs will not be effected. It is possible to place the .txn files on the same drive as the data directory, but NOT recommended. You chould not see a great performance issue on a server with this number of users.

~Tanita Zeklutexakol

Sep 16, 2014, 1:55 PM

32 Posts

Sorry, but there is no clear answer

It really comes down to the amount of i/o activity to the drive(s). For low update activity, sharing the drive w/ the txn logs is not an issue. as the i/o load to the drives increases it becomes more of an issue.

We don't have any hard and fast rule that says if your i/o activity is constantly around 40% that it will be an issue, but that being said I'd get an idea of the average i/o activity. If it is too great then it will be a problem.
I'd think anything over 40% could be an issue. The i/o activity to the databases will decrease, but the i/o activity to the txn logs will more than make up for it (the benefit to the separate drive is that the i/o activity to the txn logs isn't that great since it is all sequential i/o, but on a shared device it become random i/o due to head contention w/ the databases).

I would defrag the drives prior to enabling the txn logs so that the txn logs will contiguous & reduce the i/o load to some extent.

--Steve
swatts@notesdev.ibm.com