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SharePoint limits

Posted on 4/20/2008 @ 2:27 AM in #Sharepoint | 8 comments | 9035 views

Most of the limits in SharePoint are soft limits. In other words, you may exceed the limits, but in most cases you will see significant performance degradation. Some of the recommendations are as below:

Object

Guidelines

Notes

Site Collection

50,000 per website

 

Sub site

2000 per top level site collection

 

Documents

10 million per document library

This is a very arguable limit. This depends on the document size, and what specifically are you doing with the document. For instance, if you are checking-in, out and versioning – this limit is a lot lower.

 

Also, no view must return more than 2000 documents unless you create logical indexes on certain columns, in which case you can go to about 20,000 documents per view.

Items

2000 per view

As mentioned above, no view must return more than 2000 documents unless you create logical indexes on certain columns, in which case you can go to about 20,000 documents per view. This limit is common to lists and document libraries.

Document File Size

50MB recommended, no more than 2Gb ever.

Anything greater than 2GB will error out. Anything greater than 50MB will severely negatively impact your database performance. Larger artifacts should be stored in a separate site in a separate content database on a separate spindle in the database server.

Lists

No more than 2000 lists per site

In this case, Lists = Lists + document libraries. If you have 2000 of these in one site, the navigation will become extremely clumsy, so in most cases you wouldn’t hit this limit.

Field Type

256 per list

No more than 256 fields in a list should be used. Crossing this limit causes severe performance degradation. Instead, you should use linked fields instead.

Web Parts

50 per page

This is again a very arguable limit. SharePoint webparts out of the box unfortunately do not support asynchronous loading. It is possible to introduce this behavior by modifying the aspx page, but it requires developer intervention. You will note that page load times increase exponentially as the number of webparts on a page increase. This also depends on the complexity of the webpart. You should leverage AJAX for pages with a lot of webparts.

Users

No more than 2 million per website

Also  note, if the profile import of a user is too wide, this limit significantly affects both the shared service provider database, and the content database.

Number of SSPs in a farm

No more than 20. Recommended maximum = 3.

 

Number of websites per SSP

99

 

Number of sites per content DB

Less than 50,000

 

Number of content databases

100 per web application.

 

Number of search indexes

No more than 20 per farm, no more than one per SSP.

Index propagation becomes horribly complex as a large number of SSPs are added. To avoid this scenario, you should leverage scoped searches instead.

Content sources and start addresses

500 hard limit

 

Alerts

1 million alerts on a site

Your SMTP server will probably choke a long time before you hit this limit.

Search scopes

Less than 200 per site

 

 

Most of the upper limits cannot be taken verbatim quo. Many of them depend on the specific nature of your SharePoint installation. Thus, it is best to monitor your SharePoint environment regularly, and scale it out as necessary.


On 4/21/2008 7:31:43 AM Amr Elsehemy said ..
Thanks for the recommendations.

On 4/22/2008 11:02:40 AM Oskar Austegard said ..
Could you give some further insight into what you call "logical indexes on certain columns" regarding list view limits?

On 4/29/2008 6:08:25 AM Andreas Rosendahl said ..
"Number of sites per content DB: Less than 50,000"
Means "sites" in this context "site collections" or do I really have to consider all single sites (i.e. every subsite of a site collection)?

On 4/29/2008 5:46:00 PM Sahil Malik said ..
Amr - thanks.
Oskar - Yeah, you can create logical indexes - look under a list settings. Setting such indexes gives you a bump of 10 times or so.
Andreas - Yes I meant site collex.

On 5/2/2008 9:57:05 AM david said ..
Great info hard to find Thanks.. please include test set or reference documentation to make your data more authoritative.

On 8/21/2008 5:25:58 AM Matt said ..
Would I be right in thinking that I could have 2000 sub sites of each sub site of my site, so technically the limit is more than 2000 for the whole site, it just needs to be organised well? Thanks for the recommendations though.

On 8/27/2008 10:38:49 AM Matt said ..
Sahil - I thought you would be interested to know that the performance of our system only degrades severly after 2400 sub sites, I still wouldn't recommend going over 2000, but over 2400 is a definite no go...

On 8/27/2008 10:56:28 AM Sahil Malik said ..
Thanks Matt

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