SharePoint limits

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Posted on 4/20/2008 @ 2:27 AM in #Sharepoint | 15 comments | 13990 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

On 10/13/2008 8:30:03 AM Sanjiv Kumar said ..

Hi Sahil,

My team and i am working exclusively in different Sharepoint project.And our prime concern is performance issue in projects.

These data is very helpful to us during designing share point projects.

On 3/27/2009 4:49:14 PM Mary said ..

Do you know what is the row limit of a custom list? Thanks.

On 4/1/2009 6:02:59 PM Roland Richards said ..

Is there a folder limit within a digital library? ... or are the number of folder part of the 10million documents?

On 4/23/2009 11:06:03 PM Gaurav said ..

Hi Sahil,

The limit on documents in a doc lib, does that includes versions. I mean if there are a million documents with 3 major versions each, would that make it 3 million documents in total?

On 8/18/2009 8:40:32 AM aju said ..

Thnx for the info..solved my prob

On 10/19/2009 6:22:39 PM Tom said ..

Sahil,

I am assisting a client migrate 1.6 million documents into SharePoint with the need to grow to 10 million over the next 5 years. The Taxonomy is designed by department. I have been told that I should not exeed 100mb per contect database but don't understand how to architect that? We will use a top level site in MOSS 2007 as Document Center and can create as many doc libraries as we need. but how do I manage the set up and long term admin of contect databases to meet the suggested limit of 100mb per? We are virtulized and have a 4T SAN in place scalable for the future.

Thanks for the help.

On 1/11/2010 6:32:08 AM Yazen said ..

i am developing web parts for a project; the Number of those parts exceeded 500 parts

the problem is the web parts gallery gives me an error that it cant display more than 500 (its the maximum Number)

how to display more than that or what to DO ??!!!

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