I'm not really sure if this is the best place to ask, (I did post something similar on the Apple support forums) but I thought someone here may have some idea what's going on... At work I am the main "Mac Guy" and I admin about 100 Macs (G4s & G5s) using one XServe and Apple Remote Desktop. I've used NetRestore to image all the computers and it works great. The issue I'm having is with Apple Remote Desktop. I run the System Overview report about once a week to populate an Excel spreadsheet with data on all the machines. When I first install the ARD admin tool on a computer and run a report of the entire network I get all 100 responses in about 15 minutes and everything looks great. Over time (a few months) the reports take longer and longer to generate. Now (about 6 months after installing) it takes so long that it would be quicker to just walk to each machine and write down the information myself. Everything still works, its just VERY slow. I even sent a reboot command to the entire floor after work and then tried to run the reports after every machine had just rebooted and was on the login screen. Same slow performance. I usually just re-image my machine and then everything works fast again, but I'd really like to avoid doing that every few months.
I was under the impression that ARD doesn't keep historical data and every new report replaces the previous one, but the symptoms I'm seeing seem to indicate that the SQL database is getting populated with more and more data over time. This is just a guess since I know almost nothing about SQL.
I guess I just wanted to know if this is "normal" and if it is, what would a company with thousands of Macs do in this situation? Maybe ARD 3.0 will change things... Hopefully that will be out before I have to re-image my machine again.
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