the start-up time for the Standard client is currently preventing me proposing it for general use, so this would be very useful indeed.

I noticed a noticeable performance improvement with each Notes 8 beta (Symphony too) so am hoping that 8.0.1 shows a similar incremental performance improvement...should be any day now.
Meanwhile, I have stopped the Notes 8 pilot after the second admin user (besides me) commmented that he was considering reverting to Notes 7.0.2. I quickly showed him the Basic option (nlnotes.exe) and he's fine. Even I am finding its only practical to run basic on my 3-4 year old IBM laptop which is 1.5 GHz and 2 GB of RAM. At what CPU level other people finding speed is not a big issue?

If you can put up with the slow start and close times, and you only run Notes and no other application then Standard works fine. One of my users is in this boat, the others have to use Basic.

I wish I knew enough to write this myself (a few people have asked). The only really concrete suggestion I have found is to not load the Productivity Editors automatically, which did seem to speed things up quite a bit. I have plenty of power and 2GB of memory on my machine, but it still isn't fast. Of course, providing the Basic configuration both solves the problem and makes it worse, since it provides such a stark contrast.

I love the idea, but is there anyone out there who can honestly say they are "happy" with the performance they have achieved? Disabling productivity editors is the only thing I have found that makes a perceivable difference. We can only hope!

I couldn't come close to writing an FAQ about how to optimize the performance. There are some known *negative* factors, though. IBM has told us that out of date video drivers will be an issue. Also, that shared video memory (usually seen on laptops) is bad. Active anti-virus scanning of JAR files is another problem. From my personal experience, I can add that encrypting your hard drive has a significant negative impact.

Unfortunately those last two tend to be corporate standards that individual users have no control over, so adjusting them is a major business problem and certainly not a quick fix or minor tweak.

Rob - I agree that corporate standards are an issue, but it is a heck of a lot easier to get an organization to change its standards if an official FAQ from IBM states that such and such a video driver is causing performance issues with a product. That would likely be one of the real values of such a FAQ, at least if it were official. Even if it were not, it would be something to point to rather than, "I think it's those pesky video drivers!"

Couldn't agree more, Ben. That's why I promoted the idea. The FAQ should exist, and in my opinion it has to come from IBM, for exactly the "corporate standards" reason.

How about using a process manager e.g. process lasso to control apps that hog the cpu? I know that a lot of Adobe's (Macromedia) development software especially Authorware and Flash will take as much of the cpu as possible. It mightn't be a viable option in corporate environments but I use where necessary in our company (120 users).

Update:
Wow, John Head made my day with a great tip on his blog about excluding the Notes program and data directories from Symantec Antivirus scanning. Huge difference. Maybe we can roll out Notes 8 after all.

See John's tips here:

{ Link }

Knowing that as a malware writer you just make sure your crap installs into the Notes directory ...

A tuning guide is great. It's in the same vein as my idea to support tuning preferences in the notes client, by preloading DLL's to speed up startup and operation.

{ Link }

Mary Beth, please stop developing new client features and fix this issue. None of them matter if we can't deploy the client because of performance issues and we can't delay waiting for hardware to catch up. We know it's Eclipse related. Standing ovation is guaranteed at Lotusphere if you find a way to resolve this.