Tron Systems

Wanted to share a recent experience with Lotus Domino on a virtual server.
We have a client who uses Notes/Domino for mail / traveler and a small number of applications. They only have a few users and were finding that having their server on an unreliable broadband line meant that they were sometimes struggling when they were away and things went wrong with the server. We suggested that they use a cheap virtual server to host the Lotus Domino installation. We recommended a VPS from 1&1 as we've had good experiences with them in the past. We suggested a server with guaranteed minimum 2Gb memory which should be fine for their needs as they didn't really want to run anything other than Domino.
The install was fine (apart from Domino being rather keen to have a GUI). The server started fine but after a bit of activity (replication, or database access) it collapsed in a big heap.
We could see that the shmpages was maxing out into the red zone when it went. Cue lots of research and playing about with Domino INI file settings but nothing changed the way the shmpages was being handled. The document (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27039628&aid=1) from IBM got us going in the right direction. The difference with the example they gave was that we needed to decrease the shmall variable rather than increase it.

So for our 2Gb server the calculation was
2*1024^3/4096 = 524288

Except that our actual VPS was confined to a much smaller number (max value of shmpages). As a result we used the maximum value allowed for our VPS which was

32768

We issued the
sysctl -p

Server started and ran fine and has been running well for several months.

Well we're shutting up shop now until the New Year. We'll still be available for support calls but not on the general switchboard.
We would like to wish everyone, and particularly our customers, a very happy break and prosperous New Year.