Translog on a Notes Client

Daniel Nashed  9 October 2009 05:34:19

The following is a quite old trick I am using for a long time on my Notes Client. I the last couple of weeks I have been asked about this setting multiple times. So I think it might be still useful.

It it is not officially supported but can help specially on power-user workstations with a lot of large Notes databases.
Transaction Logging is only supported on Domino Servers but the backend code is also available on the Notes Client (part of the NSF sub-system).
The configuration is normally done in the server document but the back-end code uses notes.ini settings.


Translog is specially interesting if you are developing applications that might crash or hang your Notes Client (C-API, XPD Plugin Development, ...).
If you have large local databases the consistency check could take a while and maybe the crash would break your database without translog.

You can enable translog using the following notes.ini settings (256 MB are a good size for a Notes client)

TRANSLOG_AutoFixup=1
TRANSLOG_UseAll=0
TRANSLOG_Style=0
TRANSLOG_Performance=2
TRANSLOG_Status=1
TRANSLOG_MaxSize=256
TRANSLOG_Path=c:\translog

You should not rollout this setting to all your end-users. It's more for power-users, admins and developers.
There are some side effects like getting the C-API style password prompt used by add-ins because the recovery manager at start-up might need the Notes password before the client is completely started (e.g. for an encrypted database which needs recovery).
But it works like a charm for a very long time for me also in Notes 8.5.x

If you want to see the translog messages at start up you can enable the Notes client debug console (notes.ini debug_console=1) which opens a log window similar to the server console (read only) which will show all log messages and debug messages in a separate window (don't close it manually the client manages this window and closes it at Notes client shutdown -- if you close it manually your client will crash!).

-- Daniel

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