Actions speak louder than words, and testing a very large Active Directory (AD) yourself is a good way to gauge the scalability of the directory. You can search our phone number database at http://demo.esc.compaq.com/phonebook, this site uses Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) searches activated through Active Server Pages (ASP) to interrogate AD. A modified version of the load program groups the phone number data by state, then groups the data by town to create a better organizational unit (OU) model than that used for the original test. Searching is typically rapid, as you'd expect from an 8-way server. Our search for "Karen Forster" (Windows 2000 Magazine's editor in chief) found nine phone numbers in less than a second. That response time isn't bad considering that we conducted the search from Ireland and the AD scalability demo Web site is in Seattle.
