0

Performance wise, is there a limit to how many documents a document library should contain? On TechNet the limit seems to be 30,000,000.

Update: We have around 9,000 documents in a single document library currently. Is this advisable or will this affect system performance?

3 Answers 3

1

In simple words, these are NOT hard-limits but recomandations. In SP 2010, some said up to 50 mil. documents. However, beyond 5000 per CONTAINER (e.g. Folder) performance in SP2010 starts to get affected, particularly for users. It is also important to check the List throtling via Central Admin for the Web-App (Steve Peschka has a nice article http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2009/10/27/working-with-large-lists-in-sharepoint-2010-list-throttling.aspx).

Also every operation beyond configured limits of the throttling would be either stopped or trimmed. In your case, 9000 documents is almost "nothing" from Sharepoint's stand, but if you have them all in a single folder, you might consider reorganizing data.

Also use the Content Organizer which combined with Content types and Metadata on your files could automatically redistribute your files across multiple libraries or sites!!!

BLOB should be considered for improved caching experiences, and is not actually resolving data viewing for end-users, but it would for downloading files once retrieved.

Hope it helps, C:\Marius

1

The first comment here:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/b8af158e-4dff-439d-86c6-b87585f81fe8/

seems to suggest 2,000 items. But there is no hard number for an answer to this. This is one of those "case by case basis" questions. One thing to keep in mind is the size of the documents you are storing. This thread:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010setup/thread/29744f75-39fc-4651-9bbe-affb1777aeb9/

discusses site collection size as something to keep in mind when determining this. (They recommend 100GB as the maximum size of a site collection.)

1

There are a lot of things to consider. Yes they can support up to 30 million per library, 60 million for a content database. It is recommended that folders be utilized and that they not have more than 2000 items per folder. Other things to take into consideration are the size of the farm, the resources has available. Will search be indexing all of this content, if so does search have its own crawl server separate from the content server. The last thing to possibly consider would be utilizing BLOB storage. If you have noticed a performance drop because of the amount of documents I would try putting them in separate folders and if search is running on the same server stop the search service temporarily to see if you get any performance increases. What is the purpose of the library, is it to fit one specific need or is it just a copy of an existing share? You may also want to consider separate document libraries based on purpose/department, etc.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.