Good points. The link tracking was indeed a bite in the ass. I caught that one pretty early on the game so it didn't give us significant growth though. I was busy shutting down all of the services and I made MS tell me what that one was for and I was like... I don't want that, and killed it in the DC policy and purged the small number of objects we had (maybe 5000).
The switch to K3 from 2K did significantly reduce the DIT size as well, I actually think it was on the order of 30-40% and took the GC DIT to around 5-6GB from the 8GB it was on the 2K DCs. For the DITs up in the 50-100GB range that Eric saw I would strongly question the data going into the directory. That sounds like a company that took MS's early ramblings of AD as the every directory to heart and actually did it forgetting the primary functionality of the directory and what I think should be protected at all costs, the NOS aspects of the directory. Remember the more garbage you have in the directory that is undergoing change (or churn if you want) the slower you are getting NOS specific updates replicated around. All of that stuff goes through the same replication system and urgent replication means things are queued urgently, not replicated urgently[1]. joe [1] At least that was the case the last time I watched the replication queue for any serious length of time. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Grillenmeier, Guido Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 4:00 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] NTDS.dit size It's also worth to point out, that you have to distinguish heavily between the OS version and the DIT size to expect. Other cleanup tasks can also strongly impact DIT size. At HP our Win2000 GCs had an average DIT size of 18GB - we then disabled the "Distributed Link Tracking" service on all DCs as it feeds AD with a ton of garbage information (actually the information would be quite useful if any app were using it - but as even the MS apps make no use to lookup the new location of moved files in AD, this service is useless). After removal of a ton of link-objects which were collected over the years in each domain's \System\FileLinks container, we decreased the DIT size easily by 6GB (don't have the exact values of the top of my head) - naturally this was after the tombstone lifetime and an offline defrag. So now we were down down to something like 12GB. Checkout Q312403 for more details - if you're running a new Win2003 AD, this service will be turned off by default. Then the first Win2003 DCs were introduced (we did perform some inplace upgrades, but eventually all of them were re-installed) => the single-instance store of ACEs introduced in Win2003 saved us another 5GB and thus got us down to 7GB => so now we're 11GB less than it was for a Win2000 DC with DLT objects ;-) We've further improved DIT size (and replication) by moving the DNS data into the DNS app partitions (so that they're not part of the GC). But this impact is not as dramatic (will mostly impact DIT on those DCs which aren't DNS servers...) /Guido -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of mike kline Sent: Freitag, 15. April 2005 05:43 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] NTDS.dit size Eric/Joe, Thanks for the great input! My test lab is VM ware running on 20 GB.... TB SAN that you can use as a test = very nice setup. 100 GB did those sites have really good connectivity? You can install AD from media in 2003 but I would think there would be problems in a 2000 domain with poorly connected offices. Joe, do you run joeware.net... if you do great site and thanks for the nice tools. Thanks again Mike On 4/14/05, Eric Fleischman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well I've seen very very large in test on many occasions. The numbers I > cited below (with those very descriptive adjectives) are just what I've > seen in production. I didn't think test counted. > > If you want to count test, I could fire up a test db that is a TB or so > on a san I have nearby. :) > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of joe > Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 4:58 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] NTDS.dit size > > See I almost cc'ed you on the response to get your input on this too as > I > knew you had played with some 16GB+ DITS but didn't want to bother you > for this and didn't want to speak out of turn for you. > > joe > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric Fleischman > Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 7:35 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] NTDS.dit size > > I've seen larger. > I've seen 15GB+ on MANY occasions, 30GB+ on quite a few occasions, and > 100GB+ on a few occasions. > > ~Eric > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of joe > Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 4:28 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] NTDS.dit size > > The largest production DIT I have personally seen was on the order of > 8GB for the GC DIT for a Fortune 5 company running about 250k users of which > about 180k were Exchange enabled. Also had some 250k contacts, 200k or > so computer objects, 100k or so group objects and consisted of 9 > domains. > > joe > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of mike kline > Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 2:53 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [ActiveDir] NTDS.dit size > > I know that AD can have millions of objects, just trying to see what the > real world size of some your AD databases are. Do any of you have > databases greater than 20GB+... or more? > > Thanks > Mike > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx > List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx > List archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ > > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx > List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx > List archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx > List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx > List archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ > > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx > List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx > List archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx > List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx > List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ > List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
