Lotus Notes 8.5 Standard Folder Performance

A colleague had a service desk ticket of someone’s complaining of Notes’ being really slow. He was running 8.5.1 standard. Thought memory might be an issue as he had only 1 GB of RAM. Had the desktop team test client performance with 2 GB of RAM. Still slow. Applied 8.5.1 FP4. Still slow.

My colleague did the normal database maintenance, compact, updall, etc. Still slow. Thinking it was PC related, I recommended Notes be run in basic mode.

Tested on my machine in 8.5.2 standard, I saw the same issue in his mail file which was using the 8.5 design. It was taking nearly 13 seconds for each folder to load when switching between folders. My mail file also 8.5 was fine. Closed Notes on my PC and launched again in basic. Two to three seconds to load a folder in the person’s mail file.

So at this point, we knew we had a problem with his mail database as it exhibited the same behavior on his, mine, and my colleague’s PC in both standard and basic modes.

I looked further at database properties on his mail file and discovered the multi-lingual database option was checked on the design tab with a default language of English. I disabled these on his mail file and could then open folders within the expected two to three second range that we saw in basic mode.

Not sure why with these settings set that only the client running in standard mode would be affected but resolved nonetheless.