Our awesome consulting team has put together some great information on tuning a SLES server for GroupWise 8. A lot of this can also be applied to GroupWise 2012. Check out the details…

Novell consulting is always creating excellent tools, documentation and utilities to improve the their own engagements and on occasion we can convince them to share their insight with the community and with our GroupWise administrators.

This information can be used to get the most out of your SLES environment. Feel free to augment with your own experience and share back with the community how this advice and information has impacted your environment and configuration. Thanks Ed Hanley for the great details and real-world application.

How to tune a SLES 10 server for GroupWise v8

TCP/IP Stack
Disable IP V6 (if the GroupWise GWINTER will be running on the Linux server. See
http://www.novell.com/documentation/gw8/gw8_install/?
page=/documentation/gw8/gw8_install/data/b3kipez.html which has a section “2.3.1 IPV6 Support”

Add the following to /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-lo (see TID 7007575)
MTU='1500'
All GW services should use Bind Exclusive in Cluster enviornments
All GW services should use factory default IP Port numbers in Cluster environments

File System
In nsscon
nss /NoATime=GWVOL
nss /NoSalvage=GWVOL
nss /ReadAheadBlks=GWVOL:2 ← make sure this stays at 2 or lower (default is 2)
Add the following to /etc/opt/novell/nss/nssstart.cfg
/IDCacheSize=131072 (see TID 7006996)
/UnplugAlways
If using non-NSS file systems, the NoATime attribute applies there also
If using ext3 file system, the HTree feature must be disabled to run GW on it

NCP Protocol

Add the following to /etc/opt/novell/ncpserv.conf
CROSS_PROTOCOL_LOCKS 1 (see TID 7004594)
COMMIT_FILE 1
OPLOCK_SUPPORT_LEVEL 0
MAXIMUM_CACHED_SUBDIRECTORIES_PER_VOLUME 300000
MAXIMUM_CACHED_FILES_PER_VOLUME 120000
MAXIMUM_CACHED_FILES_PER_SUBDIRECTORY 6000

Core OS
Install libstdc 33-32bit (x86_64) to run 32-bit binary GW code on 64-bit Lnux server
NAMD – (from CoolSolutions article 12597 author peter6960)

To get the current "namcd" configuration execute:
namconfig get
If the preferred-server value does not point to the local ip address, or an ip address of a server on the same physical subnet, this can be changed with the following sequence of commands:
namconfig set preferred-server=[ndsd's ip address]
namconfig -k
namconfig cache_refresh

This step can also solve a lot of other OES related issues, and increase performance.

GroupWise

Add the following to /etc/init.d/grpwise
ulimit -c unlimited
export MALLOC_CHECK_=0
GWPOA
MAX APPLICATION CONNECTIONS = 4096 (4/user)
MAX PHYSICAL CONNECTIONS = 2048 (2/user)
MESSEGE HANDLER THREADS = 12 (the sweet spot)
C/S HANDLER THREADS = 50 (auto allocates up to 99 under load, then auto de-allocates back down to 50)

Other Items
Ensure that all AV scanners are disabled for scanning the GW PO, Domain and Gateways file structures. If your AV will support it - you can scan the temp storage area for WebAccess attachments.

All servers should have Hyperthreading disabled - the second pipe has only 3 steps as opposed to the primary that has 7 - net result for a server is ~17% slow down (Windows folk noticed this 4 years later) To disable Hyperthreading - modify the BIOS of the server

If your server is dedicated to GW, Set your hard disk controller Read/Write ratio to 80/20, if possible, most controllers can only be set to 75/25. Most disk controllers are set at 50/50 as their default R/W ratio. GW is mostly doing index read in small chunks of data. The GW average number of reads is 4 times more than writes.

I hope you find this information useful and applicable. If you have further ‘tuning’ suggestions, please let us know and we will update our own documentation and best practices.

Dean