RMS Caching

RMS caches Active Directory user and group data in the SQL server Directory Services database. Caching of this information improves performance by limiting the requests made to Active Directory for this information when users request licenses to consume rights-protected content. Decreasing the number of cached entries may cause more frequent requests to Active Directory to be made for user data, depending upon the license-request load and cache expiration settings. Increasing the number may improve performance if the volume of requests to Active Directory is high.

When data is cached, changes to users and groups that have been cached may not be reflected in RMS transactions until the cached data is purged. For example, if a user whose data is cached is added to a new group, requests for RMS use licensed by this user for documents protected using the new group will be denied until the cached data is purged. Therefore, if group membership changes are common, reducing or eliminating data caching may be necessary.

By default, RMS caches data for 720 minutes (12 hours).

Caching can be enabled and disabled in the RMS Configuration database by setting the DRMS_ClusterPolicies table ID 134 to 1.

In addition, if caching is enabled, server registry keys for RMS can be set to control the level of caching. Modification of these is generally only needed to fine-tune performance if load on the RMS infrastructure increases to the point that performance degradation is seen or to resolve problems with stale cached data due to user and group modifications.