Heard on the Street: Sharepoint Scalability

I heard this second hand, so please keep that in mind. I was recently at a standards meeting where the scalability of Sharepoint was discussed. Someone told me that the limit of storage in a Sharepoint server is around 1 million content objects. They also said that Microsoft was proud of the fact that in the next release it would be able to go up to 10 million objects.

Please let me know if you have seen otherwise! Let me know your Sharepoint scalability stories.

If it's true, 1 million objects is not terribly impressive. I understand the problem is trying to store stuff into blobs in SQL server. It makes sense to store content into blobs for some use cases, but not all. That's we made it optional both in Documentum and in Alfresco. The primary model for both is to store content into files to allow streaming, operating system caching and minimize database cache collision.

Comments

[Elvira]

Hey guys very nice read regarding SharePoint performance and scalability is available here http://www.alachisoft.com/storageedge/sharepoint-performance-scalability.html

Guys any progress on "Whitepaper comparing Alfresco to Sharepoint in terms of scalabity." ? I am also interested. Btw I guess SharePoint is better since we can make it more and more scalable with the usage of third party tools like StorageEdge, AvePoint, Axceler don't know exact spellings..

[George Barber]

The limit on Sharepoint data is about 1 exabyte. Of course it's a little complicated.

[Joel]

There isn't a 1 Million item limit even. Not sure where this misinformation came from, maybe old data? There's a 5 million item/document recommendation for a list. There is a capacity boundaries article on TechNet that you could refer people to.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/6a13cd9f-4b44-40d6-85aa-c70a8e5c34fe1033.mspx?mfr=true

[Debaditya Ghosh]

Can anyone help me with a whitepaper/article describing the comparison between SharePoint and Alfresco?

[John Newton]

Lawrence -

Thanks for the clarification. However, a limitation like that can be significant problem for many organizations. Spreading things out only complicates searching, discovery and management. Good luck on your 2007 version.

Looking forward to your scalability whitepaper. I would also look forward to benchmarking Alfresco and Sharepoint. How about coming up with a common web services test so that we can compare apples to apples?

[Reuven Cohen]

I think your blog is the perfect place for second hand info.

I'd like to see a whitepaper comparing Alfresco to Sharepoint in terms of scalabity.

[Lawrence Liu [MSFT]]

John, if you heard something second hand, perhaps you should verify it before writing about it on your blog. :-) The SharePoint Product Group has a team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint), where you can leave a comment or ask a direct question.

Anyway, the "1 million objects limit" is associated with each SharePoint Document Library of which there can be several or more per site, and a typically SharePoint farm can have thousands to tens of thousands of sites. And you can have multiple farms of SharePoint servers just like Microsoft has implemented. So, a SharePoint-based solution can store and manage significantly more documents and other objects than just 1 million. Please help spread the word that scalability has been vastly improved in the 2007 versions of Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server. After we finish our performance optimizations and testing, we will publish a scalability whitepaper -- sometime in Q3CY2006.

Lawrence Liu
Senior Technical Product Manager and Community Lead
Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies
http://blogs.technet.com/lliu