SharePoint2010: How to Manage Large Lists

General Guideline

Although a list or library in SharePoint can have 5M items but when it grows larger than 2000 items, the performance of the list retrieval deteriorates. Therefore one must carefully plan a list which can possibly grow to this level. If a list is well-managed  then it does not matter whether it contains thousands or even millions of items. As a general guideline, any list should not have more than 2,000 items per list container i.e. root of the list, or any folder inside it. So for example, if you have a list with 1,900 list items in the list root, plus 100 folders each containing 2,000 items, then still this would be an ideal situation. Similarly we also need to make sure that our views do not show or edit more than 2,000 items at a time.

Practical Scenarios:

Recently I had to develop a SharePoint website for maintaining the number of hours invested by company's employees on various projects. Since that list could potentially grow to a threatening level, so planning it before time was the only option. After a meeting we decided to create a folder for each employee and then further create a year-wise folder in each employee's folder. We also applied indexing on particular columns.  

Other Methods to Optimize List Access

Other than folder option there are few other ways to optimize a list ascess. Other options such as :
  1. Indexed the Column (BTW the aricle in the hypelink was really helpful) 
  2. Apply Row Limits one way is throught SPQuery i.e. a developer Option or other case configure view item limit
  3. Rather than showing all the items on the views, limit all views and use search to query instead or  in other case show a filtered view i.e show a subset of content and performance would be based on an indexed column)
  4. Tree View in Navigation Feature in Document Center
  5. Exploit the max limit item option on all views.
  6. While accessing list programmatically, use of GetCachedListItemsbyQuery option

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