| Updated 2/11/2008 Check out Joel’s post Best Practices for Enterprise User Scalability in SharePoint where he does a deep dive on the User/ALC issue. Really recommended read!! Please check out the SharePoint Security: Hard limits and recommended practices post by Eli Robillard in which some limits that are described in the TechNet whitepaper are updated. The big thing that surprised me was the following bit that supposedly is still unproven or fixed with SP1 : Users listed in a Site Collection's User Info Gallery (aka SPWeb.SiteUsers): 1500 to 2000. No evidence can be found to support this guidance, and believe it to be a misinterpretation of the limit on ACL size. If you've been affected, please comment with further detail. Plus an interesting limit that I didn’t knew of : Users per SharePoint ACL: Query results must not exceed 64k, or ~1000 users per ACL. When exceeded, the "Parameter is incorrect" error is thrown causing crawling to fail on the item. This issue affects indexing, but does not otherwise affect SharePoint. The limit is noted by Joel Oleson in the comments of a "2003 to 2008 security changes" post and the Best Practices for SharePoint Search article on TechNet. The issue is not SharePoint-specific and will affect any content crawled with large ACLs including file system objects like Network Shares. KB article 885482 describes the cause as "The maximum buffer size of the InitializeAcl function is 64 KB. Therefore, the maximum size of an ACL in Windows, including the access control entries (ACEs) that are contained in the ACL, is 64 KB." Resolution: Either exclude the item from indexed content, or remove entries from the ACL. Mitigation: This is a rare issue normally avoided through sound design. However, since AD groups are not expanded when the ACL is read, assigning individuals to AD Groups rather than SharePoint Groups will mitigate the limit. |