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I have a query about the List view threshold on SharePoint 2013 where the limit is set to 5000 items in Central Administration.

We have a document library with 150,000+ items which means currently we have to set the item limit in CA to 200,000 which obviously is not helping the SQL side of things.

This document library has documents that people need to access on a daily basis and it could be any number of documents in there that are accessed.

I've read up on indexing columns and setting item limits in views however unsure how this would work in our scenario as we don't want it to only return a listing of certain amount of documents in the list.

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  • What answer are you looking for . How to manage the library without hitting the threshold?
    – Unnie
    Oct 6, 2016 at 11:33

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Well you hit an feature of SP called 'I am not file server' ;) There is couple of things you could do they are well documented by MS (folder structure, metadata navigation):

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Manage-large-lists-and-libraries-in-SharePoint-2013-and-SharePoint-2016-b8588dae-9387-48c2-9248-c24122f07c59?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US&fromAR=1

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262813(v=office.14).aspx

But in my opinion best way to deal with large list is to offload the work to the search index. You would have to define which columns are important, make them crawlable, sortable, refinable and searchable. The create a search page with advanced refiners / search filters to narrow down to the results they search. changing the view from standard SP Search to more 'library like' helps with user adoption of that approach. Hope that helps.

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  • I was reading this is not possible once the amount of items in a list has exceeded 5000. You would need to move the excess items out of the list into another and then index the original list of 5000 items then once done move the excess back into the original list - is this correct?
    – surfnode
    Oct 7, 2016 at 12:41
  • No not really, you can increase the list view threshold (or threshold for admins) above 200k for the time of creating an index and then drop it back to 5K. Much less painful ;)
    – Marek Sarad
    Oct 7, 2016 at 13:23
  • OK that sounds good to me. Could this problem potentially affect users from being able to access certain document libraries as some users are experiencing this problem only on certain lists where the amount exceeds 5000 items and we have the threshold set to 200,000 as there are 150,000 items already in said list.
    – surfnode
    Oct 7, 2016 at 14:47
  • Yes any lists that is not prepared to hold 5k items will sooner or later face that issue. If you will have more than 5k items you need to put some workarounds in place. By any means don't leave the list view threshold on more than 5k items. Sharepoint SQL with each query over 5k items will switch from table level locking to page level locking to table level locking and stop all other queries before lock is released, with one query it is not a problem but with multiple users it can. (ie. 1st user waits 2 sec, 2nd 4 sec... 5th 6 sec... as each query locks the content exclusively)
    – Marek Sarad
    Oct 11, 2016 at 14:17

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