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