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HOW-TO: Determine the size of NTDS.DIT and the amount of Free (White) Space in the database |
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By increasing the verbosity level of certain directory service (DS) threads, additional information is logged to the DS event log on domain controllers. The garbage collection process evaluates the size of the Directory Information Tree (DIT) - the physical Active Directory database file - and reports the size and the amount of whitespace. By increasing the verbosity of this process, the DIT size and amount of white space are logged to the DS Event Log of the DC where this is configured each time the garbage collection process runs (every 12 hours by default).
To configure a DC to log information on the size of the DIT and the amount of whitespace, modify the following registry value to a value of 0x1 (decimal 1).
HKLM\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Services\ NTDS\ Diagnostics
6 Garbage Collection
This enables Garbage Collection diagnostics logging, which will generate event 1646 every time the garbage collection runs. Information event 1646 will give you the total allocated hard disk space and free disk space in the NTDS.DIT (Active Directory database) file.
Here's an example of this event (taken from a Windows Server 2003 DC):
Event Type: Information
Event Source: NTDS Database
Event Category: Garbage Collection
Event ID: 1646
Date: 09/04/2005
Time: 10:32:51 PM
User: Everyone
Computer: DC04
Description:
Internal event: The Active Directory database has the following amount
of free hard disk space remaining.
Free hard disk space (megabytes):
17
Total allocated hard disk space (megabytes):
83
More information
For more information on Active Directory Garbage Collection and on-line defragmentation, please refer to the msresource.net knowledgebase article:
Document information
Author: Paul Williams
Written: 09-04-2005
Version: 2.0
Last updated: 27-07-2007
Last updated by: Paul Williams |
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