It took a few days to diagnose the problem. But, because of the repairs being done on site, Willy and Wally weren't allowed to make the change for another 60 days. So we limped along, fielding one complaint after another.

The problem? Well, there were eight servers sharing one host bus adapter. As long as disk activity was low, the single adapter was able to handle the load by holding reads and writes in queue. But Notes is disk intensive.

And the engineering documents on the other servers were large. The slowness I'd originally seen was Domino responding to overloaded queues on the adapter. The performance reports from the operating system only saw the server queues. It then assumed the disk reads and writes had completed.

SAN-specific software was needed to see the problem and all eight servers had to be shut down to add a second host bus adapter and finally fix things.

John Roling is an avid digital photographer, blogger and all-around techno-geek. He can be found online at http://greyhawk68.dominohosting.biz or emailed at jroling@gmail.com.