Planning for Capacity and Scale

On March 11th I presented at an invitation-only SharePoint Conference in the Midwest on Planning for Capacity and Scale. This was a redelivery of a similar session that was presented at the SharePoint Conference in Seattle last March. If you are looking for the slides, they are here: Planning for Capacity and Scale Documents

There were a few points that I had hoped to make but ran out of time:

• I demonstrated 1000, 2000, 10,000 and 50,000 items within a single folder in a document library. These documents were all at the same level (that is, sibling documents). All of these had paging enabled set to show 100 documents at a time. The user experience was acceptable for 1000, 2000 and 10,000 but not 50,000. Keep in mind that the recommended maximum number of items at the same level in a SharePoint container is 2000 so 50,000 is far over the limit. Also, even operations like adds and deletes get slower as the number of items increases.
• The /3GB switch in Windows is not supported with SharePoint. It would be a bad idea to enable this anyway because it would reduce Windows kernel memory to 1GB and could cause odd behavior or instability.
• I mentioned that content databases should have 50,000 site collections or fewer (the out of the box limit is 15,000). MySites are a common reason why you can end up with a lot of site collections in a single content database. Each user’s MySite is a site collection. Therefore, you should set up multiple content databases for MySites. Set a maximum number of site collections you will be comfortable having in each content database. SharePoint will automatically rotate between databases as users create MySites.