SharePoint big list limitations

Question

I have a scenario where there might be potentially more than 25 thousand documents in a single document library. Can a single document library SharePoint handle that number of items? What would be different alternatives?

This is for SharePoint 2013.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The boundary limit is 25 million documents inside the library, however you will come accross the List View Threshold limitations when you add more than 5.000 items (documents and/or folders) in the same folder.

There are many discussion on how to handle this, but basically you need to create views that filter the documents (in order to return less than 5000 documents) and index on the filtered properties. Take a look at this answer.

Obviously, just using search is perfectly fine. Trying to organize the content into different views is the only thing affected.

Changing the LVT from Central Administration is not a solution. It is the same as sticking your head into the sand hoping the problem will go away. It is not recommended by Microsoft and will cause performance issues with your servers.

Answer 2

I think That in these case of examples you can use Retention in Document Information Management Policy Settings!!
For Example you can move the oldest document to another lib or declare them or etc!
And if you combine this features with record management you can handle this large document library as well!

Answer 3

If you are using on-premise servers then you can remove threshold limit from central admin, which is 5000 by default. This will allow you to handle that much documents in your document library, but it may create performance issues.

If you are using Office-365, then you will face many issues due to large number of documents, as Office-365 do not offer option to change threshold limit.