Andrew Pollack's Blog

Technology, Family, Entertainment, Politics, and Random Noise

Time for another classic Notes client performance tip!

By Andrew Pollack on 03/23/2004 at 09:07 PM EDT

Its been a while since I wrote a good performance tip. This one is a favorite since it affects the most important performance of all -- what the user actually feels.

We have a busy database that resides on a server. It isn't locally replicated. It uses about a dozen keyword lookups as part of the primary form. Forms are opened and closed routinely. Its a helpdesk application in this case so people are forever going in and out of documents. Each lookup gets performed each time a document is opened or switched to edit mode -- the lookups fill in all the drop down lists. That makes opening documents slow.

Here's what I did.

First, I wrote an agent that periodically performs those lookups and stores the results on a profile document. The profile document gets one multi-value field for each of the keyword lookups. You can get fancy, and trigger this only on keyword document changes or whatever -- it wasn't really important in this case.

Next, I added code to the database script, so that whenever a user first opens the database, that profile document is retrieved and its values are copied to a database on the user's local machine. What database did I use? Why their personal address book. I store the values on a document, and give the document the form and type name "Account" -- so it ends up being in the Advanced \ Accounts view in their personal nab. I give the AccountName field a name that means something, so I can use it for lookup (SuperHelpDeskApp in our example).

Result?

When the user opens or edits one of these forms now, the lookup still happens but it happens to a LOCAL file and their local workstation caches the values quite nicely. It makes a huge impact for users across wide area networks, dialup, or other high latency environments. No local nab design changes where needed, and the field size is fine -- which could be an issue if you just try to use environment variables.


There are  - loading -  comments....



Other Recent Stories...

  1. 01/26/2023Better Running VirtualBox or VMWARE Virtual Machines on Windows 10+ Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. I has been nearly 3 years since my last blog entry. The truth is, I haven't had much to say that was worthy of more than a basic social media post -- until today. For my current work, I was assigned a new laptop. It's a real powerhouse machine with 14 processor cores and 64 gigs of ram. It should be perfect for running my development environment in a virtual machine, but it wasn't. VirtualBox was barely starting, and no matter how many features I turned off, it could ...... 
  2. 04/04/2020How many Ventilators for the price of those tanks the Pentagon didn't even want?This goes WAY beyond Trump or Obama. This is decades of poor planning and poor use of funds. Certainly it should have been addressed in the Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan administrations -- all of which were well aware of the implications of a pandemic. I want a military prepared to help us, not just hurt other people. As an American I expect that with the ridiculous funding of our military might, we are prepared for damn near everything. Not just killing people and breaking things, but ...... 
  3. 01/28/2020Copyright Troll WarningThere's a copyright troll firm that has automated reverse-image searches and goes around looking for any posted images that they can make a quick copyright claim on. This is not quite a scam because it's technically legal, but it's run very much like a scam. This company works with a few "clients" that have vast repositories of copyrighted images. The trolls do a reverse web search on those images looking for hits. When they find one on a site that looks like someone they can scare, they work it like ...... 
  4. 03/26/2019Undestanding how OAUTH scopes will bring the concept of APPS to your Domino server 
  5. 02/05/2019Toro Yard Equipment - Not really a premium brand as far as I am concerned 
  6. 10/08/2018Will you be at the NYC Launch Event for HCL Domino v10 -- Find me! 
  7. 09/04/2018With two big projects on hold, I suddenly find myself very available for new short and long term projects.  
  8. 07/13/2018Who is HCL and why is it a good thing that they are now the ones behind Notes and Domino? 
  9. 03/21/2018Domino Apps on IOS is a Game Changer. Quit holding back. 
  10. 02/15/2018Andrew’s Proposed Gun Laws 
Click here for more articles.....


pen icon Comment Entry
Subject
Your Name
Homepage
*Your Email
* Your email address is required, but not displayed.
 
Your thoughts....
 
Remember Me  

Please wait while your document is saved.