Making Sample Directory Data

How much disk and memory space you devote to Directory Server depends on your directory data. If you already have representative data in LDIF, use that data when sizing hardware for your deployment. Representative data here means sample data that corresponds to the data you expect to use in deployment, but not actual data you use in deployment. Real data comes with real privacy concerns, can be multiple orders of magnitude larger than the specifications need to generate representative data, and may not help you exercise all the cases you want to test. Representative data includes entries whose average size is close to the size you expect to see in deployment, whose attributes have values similar to those you expect to see in deployment, and whose numbers are present in proportions similar to those you expect to see in deployment.

Take anticipated growth into account when you are deciding on representative data. It is advisable to include an overhead on current data for capacity planning.

If you do not have representative data readily available, you can use the makeldif(1) command to generate sample LDIF, which you can then import into Directory Server. Chapter 4, Defining Data Characteristics can help you figure out what representative data would be for your deployment. The makeldif command is one of the Directory Server Resource Kit tools.

For deployments expected to serve millions of entries in production, ideally you would load millions of entries for testing. Yet loading millions of entries may not be practical for a first estimate. Start by creating a few sets of representative data, for example 10,000 entries, 100,000 entries, and 1,000,000 entries, import those, and extrapolate from the results you observe to estimate the hardware required for further testing. When you are estimating hardware requirements, make provision for data that will be replicated to multiple servers.

Notice when you import directory data from LDIF into Directory Server the resulting database files (including indexes) are larger than the LDIF representation. The database files, by default, are located under the instance-path/db/ directory.