Should I increase MaxControls in the SafeMode section of my web.config?

Question

In my SharePoint web.config, the SafeMode section has a MaxControls attribute that's set to 200 by default. I would like to increase this number but am concerned about possible Production performance issues and other negative side effects or unintended consequences.

Should I not be concerned? If there are negative side effects or unintended consequences that could arise, what are they? How high can I raise MaxControls and increase the number of controls in my pages without potentially causing a problem?

In our case, it's the asp:menu control's menu items in our master page that's pushing us over the limit of controls allowed. Why has Microsoft placed the default limit at 200? Has Microsoft or anyone published any useful information on this subject, like best practices?

Answer 1

Disclaimer: What I put here is my opinion and based on my experiences. I am interested in hearing what others have to say as well.

Generally I think Microsoft tends to set settings like this to be conservative to cut down on the number of possible issues. A similar example is the 50 mb file upload limit where users with bad connections may not be able to reliably upload larger files.

I had a project that required the MaxControls be increased due to the number of controls loaded in a page or in an InfoPath form. As the number of controls increases, the overall time to load the page increases (as expected). At extreme levels, there were some page stability issues. When we really pushed the boundaries, IE started throwing errors. In the end, the business stakeholders made the technical decisions which is almost never a good thing.

My advise would be to try and stay under the threshold, and validate that you really need that number of items in your form or menu. If you have a menu with over 100 items, chances are the user experience is pretty bad.

Answer 2

I am getting a message "An error occurred during the processing of . This page allows a limit of 200 controls, and that limit has been exceeded. " for one of my pages. I am using multiple data views to show data from several different lists. How do I reduce the number of controls I am using? I am not a programmer, so I'm not sure what these controls are, what do I need to be looking for?