View performance has always been less well-understood than some other areas of performance tuning, probably because it appears to be so much more difficult to measure and do something about. We have performed extensive tests over the years, and have found that there are some tips and techniques that can help you optimize view performance for your application and the underlying server.

The first thing you should do to understand view performance is to familiarize yourself with how views get built and maintained (indexed). The Domino server has a task called Update that maintains view indexes. It runs every 15 minutes by default, and will process every view in every database on the server, provided that the database has had some user (or mail, or replication) activity since the Update task last ran. On very efficient application servers, you should see the Update task finish in less than a minute, thus preserving the bulk of the Domino server's resources during the next 14 minutes...