July 19, 2008
Notes 8.0.2 beta 2
Just before heading out for O'Hare, I had the chance to upgrade to Notes 8.0.2 beta 2. Zoom! I am definitely impressed at the faster responsiveness of the Notes client (standard configuration). For example, my calendar is painting instantaneously when switching views...that was definitely not happening in 8.0.1.As a reminder, two focus areas for our performance team in 8.0.2 are launch/load time and also memory footprint. In terms of startup time, my warm boot time was under 20 seconds, with six tabs opening in the client as I started up. In terms of Notes-related processes in memory right now, things are speeding along with a svelte 155 MB consumed by eclipse.exe, nlnotes.exe, ntaskldr.exe, notes2w.exe, and java.exe. Color me impressed, especially since at the moment, Firefox is consuming twice that memory, all by itself....
A few of the changes made to zoom things along are visible to the end user. First, a progress meter is now visible in the splash screen:
Second, the startup sequence has been optimized. I was prompted for my Notes password less than five seconds into startup, The client continued to load while I entered the password, making the time from that click to being in a usable state a whole lot shorter.
Last, not everything Notes uses is loaded into memory straightaway. You'll notice I didn't include soffice.exe in those memory figures. I haven't loaded any of the Symphony productivity editors yet, so no tasks associated with them are running. Once I did launch a spreadsheet, soffice.exe came into memory, using less than 14 MB, and loading in less than 15 seconds.
Now, as we say state-side, "your mileage may vary". My machine config is a Thinkpad T60, 2 GB RAM, Windows XP SP2. It's not exactly a screamer, so I think the results here are reasonably indicative of the kinds of improvements you'll see when you get Notes 8.0.2.
Release 8.0.2 of Notes/Domino is still on track for August (officially I believe I am supposed to say "Q3 2008"). If you are looking to try out 8.0.2 on the iNotes (formerly DWA) side in order to check out the experience on the Apple iPhone, you can do so on the Lotus Greenhouse. And as I offered at beta 1, if you want access to the beta, send me e-mail @work... please include your "LDD ID". I provided beta 1 access to over 50 people after my last blog entry...unfortunately, so far, none of the customers who were part of that group have come forward to be references for the improvements. Perhaps after seeing how much better beta 2 is, someone's ready to be quoted in my 8.0.2 press release?
(Thank you to those business partners and consultants who have offered.... we will let you know....)
Update 4 August: As we are getting close to shipping, I can no longer add additional participants to the beta.
Location: AA1904, ORD-MIA
It is great to see the progress, even between the beta builds. The pre-launch progress bar was clunky in beta 1 and in beta 2 it looks much more professional. A very good concept now with a good UI.
Question - for shops still on 7.X or earlier, does 8.0.2 make sense or does waiting for 8.5 make more sense? It seems odd to have two versions of the same thing being developed and released around the same time. You would think 8.5 would make 8.0.2 obsolete?
Here is an observation from Enzo Stanzione: { Link }
On a 1GB machine, seeing similar results. Nice one!
@1 - I guess it depends on your orientation. 8.5 is a feature release coming later in the year... if you want to deploy "now", then 8.0.2 is the right approach. 8.5 is primarily a server-focused release, though there's some cool client stuff in there... I have discussed the complexity of 8.0.2 vs. 8.5 with development and they have indicated that product management/development will issue a "which release to deploy" type of guideline paper. I haven't seen it yet, so in my mind (as you can tell by what I personally am running), 8.0.2 is faster time-to-value...
on 7/21/2008 2:09:03 AM -
@1 according to me, deploying 802 or 8.5 is also a matter of "how fast your company will be able to upgrade" after the version is installed.
I mean, 8.5 promesses SO much with XPages and improvements in composite apps that if your "next" upgrade window is in 4 years, I would wait for 8.5/1.
If you can upgrade now and upgdrade some app servers for ex in 09, going 802 is quite reasonable.
Keeping in mind that if 802 is deployed, upgrading to 8.5 should be very easy (provided that you set yourself ready to do smartupgrade and so on...)
on 7/21/2008 7:41:27 AM -
Seeing similar improvements on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 (NB: not actually a supported platform for 8.0.2, but seems to work quite well).
The startup and shutdown times really are drastically improved; when starting up, my password prompt box appears almost immediately, and as Ed says, Notes carries on loading while you're typing in your password. Bravo!
Increases in speed of operations thereafter - tab switching between mail and calendar tabs etc - are not so dramatic, but definitely noticeable.
The Notes tasks, notes2w and lnotes, consume 150 Meg of RAM between them. (Firefox takes only 7O Meg, with 6 tab windows open).
This is on a 3 year old desktopPC, upgraded to an Opteron 185 processor (2.6 GHz, dual-core) with 2 Gig of RAM.
For anybody else testing this code, a clean install is definitely recommended. I started by upgrading the previous 8.0.2 beta, which was itself an upgrade of 8.0.1, and it crawled.
Cheers,
- Mike
With the ease of upgrading so easy with SuRunAs and Smart Upgrade ( which I just used to upgrade our Pittsburgh Office to 8.0.1 last week ) then I would suggest you don't bother waiting for 8.5 and just start your rollout process with 8.0.2 and then move to 8.5 once your ready.
Personally as soon as 8.0.2 is released I'll be getting our office upgraded within a few days. Nothing like being cutting edge ;-)
on 7/21/2008 12:16:55 PM -
Any word on whether Firefox 3 will be supported in 8.0.2? The fix list isn't helpful on this.
Are roaming profiles back in the mix with 8.0.2 or is that still coming back in 8.5?
on 7/21/2008 9:32:57 PM -
any chance Roaming will be supported in 8.0.2 or am I stuck using Basic until 8.5 still?
on 7/21/2008 9:33:53 PM -
ooops, should have read Jim's post. sorry for the duplication
@7 and @8 Roaming the Notes Standard Client is part of the 8.5 client release.
on 7/22/2008 1:35:59 PM -
@6 Firefox 3.0 is not on the list for 8.0.2. That said, we did some minor work in DWA to have most things work, but it is not officially supported. What specifically were you looking for Firefox 3.0? Domino support, DWA, or som client interaction?
on 7/23/2008 12:21:12 PM -
@11 We're looking mostly for iNotes support using Firefox 3.
on 7/23/2008 11:24:07 PM -
What is worse with Firefox 3 is Sametime meetings do not work. I have to use IE. Let's hope no one sees me.
So, if we make the password complexity somewhere between 12 and 16, then the client will probably have loaded completely by the time the password has been entered... :)
By the way, good work all!
on 7/24/2008 11:46:23 PM -
@13 - what version of Sametime server ?
I just did a test meeting on 8.0 and 8.0.1 internally, and they seemed to be ok. Admittedly I have not tried a real meeting with it since I have been using Unyte a lot.
I like it! Even on an older machine with 500 MB RAM starting time is now acceptable (about 10 seconds until the password prompt appears and some further 15 seconds until the homepage is there). The times were more than double with 8.01. Good work!
Now please fix one more thing: If you switch to another window during loading time and then return to Notes, the password prompt seems to have the focus but it hasn't. You type your password but the box remains empty. Only after clicking into the box it gets the focus. Sometimes annoying!
JFranchetti on 7/20/2008 12:08:17 PM -