I've had several questions lately about the limitations of SharePoint 2007. Numbers like the maximum document upload size, items per folder per document library and the maximum number of subsites per site collection are figures that must be taken into consideration when making a SharePoint architrecture.
There is some good documentation about these boundaries available on TechNet. Because it's hard to find, some details from the article:
| Site object |
Guidelines for acceptable performance |
Notes |
Scope of impact when performance degrades |
| Site collection |
50,000 per Web application |
Total farm throughput degrades as the number of site collections increases. |
Farm |
|
Web site |
250,000 per site collection |
You can create a very large total number of Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example, 100 sites, each with 1000 subsites, is 100,000 Web sites. The maximum recommended number of sites and subsites is 125 sites with 2,000 subsites each, for a total of 250,000 sites. |
Site collection |
|
Subsite |
2,000 per Web site |
The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well as the number of subsites surpasses 2,000. |
Site view |
|
Document |
5 million per library |
You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders, using standard views and site hierarchy. This value may vary depending on how documents and folders are organized, and by the type and size of documents stored. |
Library |
|
Item |
2,000 per view |
Testing indicates a reduction in performance beyond two thousand items. Using indexing on a flat folder view can improve performance. |
List view |
|
Document file size |
50MB (2GB max*) |
File save performance is proportional to the size of the file. 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. |
Library, file save performance |
|
List |
2,000 per Web site |
Testing indicates a reduction in list view performance beyond two thousand entries. |
List view |
|
Field type |
256 per list |
This is not a hard limit, but you might experience list view performance degradation as the number of field types in a list increases. |
List view |
|
Column |
2,000 per document library
4,096 per list |
This is not a hard limit, but you might experience library and list view performance degradation as the number of columns in a document library or list increases. |
Library and list view |
|
Web Part |
50 per page |
This figure is an estimate based on simple Web Parts. The complexity of the Web Parts dictates how many Web Parts can be used on a page before performance is affected. |
Page |
Read the complete article here.