AD growth & history

[youpski]

Hi,

We have a feeling that our AD has grown with some 40% in the last two
months. We can't really account for this growth. Is there a way to
determine growth specifics in time about the AD size? Maybe according
to the number of objects, USN's.. etc.

And: How do I determine the number of objects in AD? I saw a vb-script
for this. Are there other ways to accomplish this count?

any help is greatly appreciated,
thnx in advance Y

 

[Simon Geary]

What exactly has grown in size? Is it the Sysvol folder or just the ntds.dit
file?
You can also consider an offline defragmentation of AD which can clean up
some wasted space. http://support.microsoft.com/?id=232122

 

[youpski]

It is the NTDS.DIT that has grown in size

What exactly has grown in size? Is it the Sysvol folder or just the ntds.dit
file?
You can also consider an offline defragmentation of AD which can clean up
some wasted space. http://support.microsoft.com/?id=232122

 

[Simon Geary]

In that case, an offline defrag will be your best bet at clearing up space,
as well as deleting unused stuff from AD.

 

[Tim Springston \(MSFT\)]

Performance monitoring on the NTDS performance object (perhaps DS Directory
writes) may be a good way to monitor growth over time.

To help compare differences of whitespace and other info within the database
itself you could use DSASTAT.EXE (from the Support Tools). You should be
able to filter on object type as well.