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Preventing Domino from Filling up the C: Drive

I love learning new stuff, though usually I prefer not to learn about new things during disaster recovery, particularly if they're the cause of the problem.

Today, I learned something new about Domino.

Keeping Domino off C: Drive.
We all know about keeping domino off the C: Drive of our servers. It's one of the first things you learn when setting up any windows server, Keep the operating system on C: drive and put the apps and/or data on D: drive.

It is possible to put Domino on C: and point the data directory to D:. I've heard of people doing that in the past but it's not really something I'd like to do. For a start, there's the crashdumps... Since they vary a little from one release to the next, how do I know where they're going to be stored?

If you fill up D: drive, the applications and users will experience some irritation. If you fill up the C: drive, your server is dead. You'll have to move data under less than ideal conditions.

So, my general rule is "keep stuff of C:".

I have enough problems just dealing with the fact that the Windows operating system seems to double in size with service packs every six months.

I was therefore quite surprised to find domino complaining about space restrictions on drive C:


Nasty Windows Defaults
The message I got was;

21/07/2009 11:14:31 AM Unable to use optimized view rebuild for view 'All Requests|vwAllRequests' due to insufficient disk space at C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\notesA5BA53. Need approximately 5831 MB for this view. Using standard rebuild instead.

I looked at it and said... hang on... this is C: drive.

I checked my c: drive and we still had 3 GB available. No panicking there but WHY was domino touching my C: ?

It turns out that when domino is rebuilding views (updall -R) or when users open views for which the index has been deleted, domino needs to generate temporary files to sort the data.

IBM recommends using a different drive to the main domino data drive to distrubute disk I/O, which is fine with me.

What is NOT FINE with me is that they've automatically assumed the right to access my system drive and are using the default Windows Temp folder for this operation.

It turns out that the fix was pretty simple;

Just add the following setting;

View_Rebuild_Dir=D:\REBUILD

to your server's Notes.ini file (and probably restart the server).

Of course, the D:\REBUILD folder needs to exist and if you've got an E: drive to point to ... even better.

BTW: Thanks Glen for doing the investigative work for this one.
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Paul Mooney said…
Always remember the disk configuration under the hood is critical aswell. C and D are well and good, unless they are the same disks. Try to use separate arrays. Especially if you are using txn logging
4:58 pm
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