SharePoint 2010 Size and Performance Recommendations

This post will answer all the below questions :

How many web applications can we have in SharePoint 2010?
How big should be the Content database?
How many site Collections can I create?
How many sub sites can I create? etc...

Web application limits -

The following table lists the recommended guidelines for Web applications.

Content database - 300 per Web application Supported.
With 300 content databases per Web application, end user operations such as navigating to the site or site collections are not affected. But administrative operations such as creating a new site collection will experience performance degradation. We recommend that you use Windows® PowerShell™ to manage the Web application when a large number of content databases are present.

Zones - 5 per Web application.
The number of zones defined for a farm is hard coded to 5. Zones include Default, Intranet, Extranet, Internet, and custom.

Managed path - 20 per Web application Supported
Managed paths are cached on the Web server, and CPU resources are used to process incoming requests against the managed path list. If you plan to exceed twenty managed paths in a given Web application, we recommend that you test for acceptable system performance.

Content database limits -

Content database size - 200 GB per Content database Supported
We strongly recommended limiting the size of content databases to 200 GB to help ensure system performance. Content database sizes up to 1 terabyte are supported only for large, single-site repositories and archives with non-collaborative I/O and usage patterns, such as Records Centers.

Site collection limits
The following table lists the recommended guidelines for site collections.

Number of Site - 250,000 per site collection Supported

The maximum recommended number of sites and subsites is 250,000 sites.
You can create a very large total number of Web sites by nesting subsites. For example, in a shallow hierarchy with 100 sites, each with 1,000 subsites, you would have a total of 100,000 Web sites. Or a deep hierarchy with 100 sites, each with 10 subsite levels would also contain a total of 100,000 Web sites.

Site collection size - 100 GB per site collection Supported.
A site collection should not exceed 100 GB unless it is the only site collection in the database. Certain site collection actions, such as site collection backup/restore or Move-SPSite, cause large Microsoft SQL Server® operations which can have performance impact or fail if other site collections are active in the same database.


List and library limits -

List Items - 30,000,000 per list Supported.
You can create very large lists using standard views, site hierarchies, and metadata navigation. This value may vary depending on the number of columns in the list and the usage of the list.

Documents - 30,000,000 per library Supported.
You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders, using standard views and site hierarchy.

Sites and Subsites -

Subsite - 2,000 per site.
The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well as the number of subsites surpasses 2,000. Similarly, the All Site Content page and the Tree View Control performance will degrade significantly as the number of subsites grows.

Web Parts -

Web parts - 25 per wiki Page or Web part page
This figure is an estimate based on simple Web Parts.