Why MOSS 2007 is pitiful for business level applications

According to this article (on MS No Less), at 100,000 records, it will take 8 seconds to delete a record. It is performance like this that kills off prospects of using Sharepoint 2007 and the built in lists for serious applications. The Sharepoint 2007 list/library limit performance-wise is for 2000 per root list folder (you should use folders for a more scalable approach.

See the following for more details:
http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102377231033

This link also shows the percentage decline in performance. In particular, see the section on Flat structure versus folder structures.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/WSS/en/library/2aa12954-2ea7-475c-9dce-663f543820811033.mspx?mfr=true

The relvant part of the article can be found here:

Throughput differences between flat document library vs. document library with folders

Throughput for certain operations decreases as the number of items in a folder increases.

The following figure shows the difference in throughput between viewing all items in a document library with and without the effective use of folders, which is critical for scaling. As shown in the graph below, throughput performance degrades as the number of documents increases when flat library storage is used. The quickest drop in throughput occurs when the total number of documents is less than 2,000, from 151 RPS (at 200 documents) to 63 RPS (at 2,000 documents). At 4,000 documents, throughput decreases to about 13 RPS, or an overall throughput decrease of over 90% from an empty library.

The following figure shows the relative performance between folder views when folders are used to store and organize documents, and an indexed view of a flat library structure. Each folder contains 500 documents created by different users. In this scenario, there is no significant throughput degradation up to 1 million documents for either scenario, provided that the number of items in the view does not exceed the performance threshold for your system. However, performance is better when folders are used.

As the number of items in a folder increases, folder view performance will gradually degrade. Note that the above results are estimates based on our testing, and results may vary in your environment.

David Klein http://www.ssw.com.au/