The rule of thumb for SharePoint lists has always been “no more than 2000 items in a given container”.
Now in the recently released White Paper “SharePoint Performance Optimization - How Microsoft IT Increases Availability and Decreases Rendering Time of SharePoint Sites”, the following is stated in the Best Practices section:
“Manage large lists for performance
Having large lists by itself is not necessarily a performance issue. When SharePoint Server renders the many items in those lists, that can cause spikes in render times and database blocking. One way to mitigate large lists is to use subfolders and create a hierarchical structure where each folder or subfolder has no more than 3,000 items.”
The 2000 items was always a soft limit, of course, but interesting to see MS now saying 3000…
It’s not a new limit, just a MS IT example where they push the suggested limits.
Hello Joel,
2000 or 3000 is just a new suggested number as you mention“It’s not a new limit, just a MS IT example where they push the suggested limits.”
Just in my experience with lists there is always a tendency to store unlimited data by end users with no limitations or guidance and that is when the problems arise. In one of my last locations We had about 3k site collections and list that had over 10k items which most of them got corrupted. You would get the typical you cannot complete this action error or Render Failed even.
That is when we decided to Utilized SQL and BDC for list over 4k items.
Have you ever stress test list in order to determine when problems arise?