SharePoint Performance Limits

I wrote this article over a year ago, but many of my old posts are missing from this new blog location.

Below are all of the SharePoint 2007 performance guidelines post SP1 summarized.  Note not all of these are "limits" but many are just suggested thresholds by Microsoft. Referenced Material: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx

• SSP Shared Service Providers   · 3 per Farm sugg, 20 max
• Zone   · 5 per Farm
• Web Application   · 99 per SSP
• IIS Application Pool  · 8 per Web Server
• Site Collection   · 50,000 per Web Application
• Site Collection   · 50,000 per Content Database
• Site Collection   · 150,000 per Web Application * if spread across multiple Content DB
• Content Database   · 100 CDB per Web Application
• Index Servers   · 1 per SSP
• Excel Calculation Services/Apps   · No Limit
• Query Servers   · No Limit
• Web Server/Database Server Ratio   · 8 Web Servers per Database server
• Web Server/Domain Controller ratio   · 3 Web Servers per Domain Controller
  • however Microsoft is ASSUMING that your current DC are following their Guidelines for DC Capacity Planning recommendations according to those best practices of aproximately 1 DC per 10,000+ users.  Most customers have MANY more DCs than they should have, because they don't do proper DC capacity planning.
• Web Site   · 250,000 per site collection
• Subsite   · 2,000 per Web Site
• Documents   · 5 million per library (sugg < 2,000 per Folder, Folders not nested too deep)
• Document file size   · 2 GB  * the limit is NOT 50MB that is simply the "default" setting, most customers change this to 2GB
• Item   · 2,000 per View
• List   · 2,000 per Web Site
• Field Type   · 256 per list
• Column   · 2,000 per Document Library
• Column   · 4,096 per list
• Web Part   · 50 per page
• Content Query,Cross List Web Parts
• limit of 1,000 cross lists to query however, this IS over-ridable at the command level
• Managed Paths   · 20 per Web Application
• User in groups   · 2 million per Web Site
• User Profile   · 5 million per farm
• Security Principals   · 2,000 per ACL on any object
• Search Indexes   · 1 per SSP
• Search Indexes   · 20 per Farm
• SSPs   · 20 SSPs per Farm
• Indexed Documents   · 50,000,000 per Content Index
• Content Sources   · 500 per SSP
• Start Addresses   · 500 per content source
• Alerts   · 1,000,000 per SSP
• Scopes   · 200 per site
• Display groups   · 25 per site
• Crawl rules   · 10,000 per SSP
• Keywords   · 15,000 per Site
• Crawled Properties   · 500,000 per SSP
• Managed Properties   · 100,000 per SSP
• Authoritative Pages   · 200 per relevance level
• Results removal · 100 during one operation
• Crawl Logs   · 50,000,000 individual log entries

Microsoft Best Practices:

• Separate NICS to handle inbound and outbound traffic. 
• Use Gigabit NICs with sefl-switching cards set to over-ride to use 1 Gigabit. 
• If using a Gigabit switch ensure the same number of inbound/outbound channels.
• All front end servers should have LAN bandwidth and latency to the SQL back end server up to 1 millisecond latency. 
• Custom Coding: No more than 2-3 SQL round trips. 
• Consider moving the SSP databases onto a different physical database server.
• Always use 15,000 RPM disks where possible.
• Segregate the configuration database and content databases into different SCSI disks in a RAID 5.
• Segregate search databases, temporary databases, and temporary database logs onto different high-speed SCSI disks in a RAID 10.  Add additional drives to the disk array to increase total I/O.
• Defrag databases and drives on a regular basis.    
• Build a temp data file for each processor core on the server.
• WSS & MOSS are CPU intensive. Use 64bit 4 multi-core processors
• · Implement a caching strategy, or distribute databases across multiple physical servers. 
• · TTL issues: Keep Page download size small.
• · Use 64bit OS and 8-16 GB RAM
• · Exclude SQL databases files from antivirus software scans.

1/17/2009 8:03 PM