Read this article about “SharePoint Scaling Limits” on http://markharrison.co.uk/blog/2004/09/sharepoint-scaling-limits.htm
And this one from Microsoft support : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827930/en-us
Two tables from the first article :
| SharePoint items |
Maximum |
Note |
| Site collections (Database scope) |
50,000 |
Total throughput degrades as the number of
site collections increases |
| Web sites (Web site scope) |
2,000 |
The interface for enumerating subsites of a
given Web site does not perform well much
beyond 2,000 subsites |
| Web sites (Site collection) |
250,000 |
You can create a very large total number of
Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example, 100
sites each with 1000 subsites is 100,100 Web sites |
| Documents (Folder scope) |
2,000 |
The interfaces for enumerating documents in
a folder do not perform well beyond a thousand entries |
| Documents (Library scope) |
2 million |
You can create very large document libraries
by nesting folders |
| Security principals (Web site scope) |
2,000 |
The size of the access control list is limited
to a few thousand security principals, in other words users and groups in
the Web site |
| Users (Web site scope) |
2 million |
You can add millions of people to your Web
site by using Microsoft Windows security groups to manage security instead
of using individual users |
| Items (List scope) |
2,000 |
The interface for enumerating list items does
not perform well beyond a few thousand items |
| Web Parts (Page scope) |
100 |
Pages with more than 100 Web Parts are slow
to render |
| Web Part personalization (Page scope) |
10,000 |
Pages with more than a few thousand user personalizations
are slow to render |
| Lists (Web site scope) |
2,000 |
The interface for enumerating lists and libraries
in a Web site does not perform well beyond a few thousand entries |
| Document size (File scope) |
50 MB |
The file save performance degrades as the file
size grows. The default maximum is 50 MB. This maximum is enforced by the
system, but you can change it to any value up to 2 GB (2047 MB) if you have
applied Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 1. |
| SPS Features |
Typically |
Maximum supported
or tested |
Maximum is hard
limit |
| Portal sites (full) |
2 |
15 |
x |
| Portal sites (child) |
10 |
100 |
X |
| Areas |
1,000 |
10,000 |
|
| Best Bets |
1,000 |
25,000 |
|
| Area depth |
5 |
20 |
X |
| User profiles |
50,000 |
1,000,000 |
|
| Audiences |
500 |
10,000 |
|
| Audience memberships |
500,000 |
5,000,000 |
|
| SSO credentials |
100 |
100,000 |
|
| Search indexes |
3 |
32 |
|
| Content sources |
25 |
250 |
|
| Search scopes |
25 |
250 |
X |
| Indexed documents per content index |
100,000 |
5,000,000 |
|
| Indexed documents |
2,500,000 |
20,000,000 |
|
| Thesaurus entries |
1,000 |
10,000 |
|
| Alerts |
50,000 |
1,000,000 |
|
| Team sites |
10,000 |
250,000 |
|
| Personal sites |
10,000 |
250,000 |
|
Moreover, read this article on Microsoft Support KB : Error messages when you delete or rename large folders or sites in Windows SharePoint Services
Read particularly this information about scaling limits
Windows SharePoint Services users cannot delete a folder, a document library, a site, or a site collection if either of the following conditions is true:
- The folder, the document library, the site, or the site collection contains over 40,000 subfolders and documents.
- The size of the folder, the document library, the site, or the site collection is larger than (but not equal to) 2 gigabytes (GB).
Windows SharePoint Services users cannot rename a folder, document library, site, or site collection if either of the following conditions is true:
- The folder, the document library, the site, or the site collection contains over 10,000 subfolders and documents.
- The size of the folder, the document library, the site, or the site collection is larger than (but not equal to) 500 megabytes (MB).
The calculation of the maximum number of objects that a folder, a document library, a site, or a site collection can contain includes the root folder, the subfolders, the documents that are contained in the root folder, and the documents that are contained in the subfolders.
For example, a document library that contains 9,993 documents exceeds the maximum limit of 10,000 items. The number of items that is calculated for the document library is actually 10,001 because the number of items includes the number of documents (9993), the number of files in the Forms folder (6), the forms folder (1), and the root folder of the document library (1).