Active Directory Cookbook

12.7. Disabling Inter-Site Compression of Replication Traffic

Problem

You want to disable inter-site compression of replication traffic.

Solution

You need to modify the options attribute of the site-link object that connects the sites you want to disable compression for. Site-link objects are stored in the following location:

cn=IP,cn=Inter-site Transports,cn=Sites,cn=Configuration,<ForestRootDN>

The options attribute is a bit flag. In order to disable compression, you must set bit 4, or 0100 in binary. If the attribute is currently unset, you can simply set it to 4. If it contains a value, you should see Recipe 4.12 for more information on properly setting bit flags.

Discussion

By default, data replicated inter-site is compressed. By contrast, intra-site replication traffic is not compressed. It is useful to compress inter-site traffic if the traffic is going over a WAN on the assumption that the less traffic the better. The trade-off to reduce WAN traffic is increased CPU utilization on the bridgehead servers replicating the data. If CPU utilization is an issue on your bridgehead servers and you aren’t as concerned about the amount of traffic being replicated, you should consider disabling inter-site compression.

See Also

Recipe 4.12 for setting bit flag attributes