AD LDS – Maximum Users in a Group

ad-ldsgroupsusers

Microsoft published the recommended maximum limits for users in an Active Directory group. It basically says :

Starting with Windows Server 2003, the ability to replicate discrete changes to linked multivalued properties was introduced as a technology called Linked Value Replication (LVR).

and

This allows the number of group memberships to exceed the former recommended limit of 5,000 for Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003 at a forest functional level of Windows 2000.

Given the replication meta data below, can anybody tell me what is the maximum number of users a AD-LDS group can hold ?

Getting 'CN=Member,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,CN={67B333FE-ADB4-430D-AAEE-D4CCE4B98A2E}' metadata...
23 entries.
 AttID     Ver   Loc.USN                      Originating DSA            Org.USN         Org.Time/Date
 =====     ===   =======                      ===============        =======         =============
     0       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
     3       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 20001       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 20002       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 2001e       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 20020       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 20021       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 20032       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 200a9       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 200c2       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 200da       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 200e2       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 200e7       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 20119       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 2014e       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 201cc       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 90001       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 90094       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 90095       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 900aa       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 90177       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 9027f       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49
 9030e       1        95    8ba30efb-9aa4-4e55-8f7c-268e3dcc536b          95    2012-07-17 14:25:49

Best Answer

I did not find a valid, clear answer, so wrote some code to create 1 milion users, and add them to a single group.

On a 1vCPU, 2G RAM virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 R2, we found that :

  1. AD-LDS has no problem holding that much data.
  2. Adding a user to the directory or to the group is done in constant time, regardless of group membership size
  3. ADSIEdit has a hard time listing users when the count goes over 5k. It works but the mmc.exe process consume a lot of CPU time and the whole thing slows to a crawl
  4. LDP virtual list view works, but you have to tell it what you are looking for. Listing all values is too slow to work
  5. Apache Directory Studio was stable and fast, with good support for paging.