Notes intermittently hangs or opens mail or other database slowly after 30 minutes of inactivity
Daniel Nashed – 25 October 2024 09:23:37
This might help you in some network situations and it came up today in the OpenNTF Discord chat.
TCP/IP keep alive is a functionality in the network stack to tell the server's TCP/IP stack and also the active components like firewalls, VPNs etc, that your session is still alive -- even the application is not sending any data.
The Windows default keep interval is 2 hours. This Windows sends a keep alive for a TCP/IP session only.
Linux and MacOS have a default keep alive interval of 75 seconds, which is a much more reasonable default.
On your Windows client you can change the value by adding a new registry value, specifying a shorter keep alive interval in milliseconds.
A good default value would be 75 seconds like on Linux and MacOS.
This is mainly important for clients, but might apply to servers as well for outbound connections.
Depending on your firewall, VPN and other active components on your way to your Domino server, this could cause those type of issues.
Value to set in registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
DWORD KeepAliveTime=75000
Technote describing the background and details.
https://support.hcl-software.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0079436
IMHO this should be highlighted more and I would wish Microsoft would come up with a better default after all those years.
I personally did not run into it, because my client always replicates.
Also it is still a good idea to set the Domino server's session timeout as suggested to properly close sessions when idle for a long time.
This resources server and also firewall resources.
The default value is 240 minutes. The recommended value is 30-45 minutes. I would set it to 30 minutes.
notes.ini Server_Session_Timeout=30
Reference: https://help.hcl-software.com/domino/14.0.0/admin/conf_server_session_timeout_r.html
-- Daniel
Historic side note: the XPC mentioned in documentation is for modem not TCP/IP connections that some of you might recall from the early days.
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