The recommended maximum number of categories that you can create on a computer that is running SharePoint Portal Server 2001 is 500 (320180)

INTRODUCTION

This article discusses the recommended maximum number of categories that you can create on a computer that is running Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001. The "Capacity planning for Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001" white paper recommends a maximum number of 500 categories per server.

MORE INFORMATION

The "Capacity planning for Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001" white paper contains the following recommendation for the number of categories that you can create in SharePoint Portal Server 2001:

Maximum number of categories

The maximum recommended number of categories is 500. However, this number of categories can have a negative impact on performance with certain corpus types. Key factors affecting performance are the total number of categories and the total number of documents in all categories. If the average number of documents per category is 20, then the maximum recommended number of categories is 200.

If you create more than 500 categories, you may experience decreased performance. Additionally, the category dictionary may be damaged. That is, categories may be missing from the category dictionary. For example, some categories may not be listed in the Categories box when you modify a document profile.

The list of categories is stored as a Microsoft Exchange record. The maximum size of a record is 3791 bytes (B). The record has several multi-valued properties. The formula that is used to determine the maximum size of each property depends on the number of values and the size of each value of that property.

REFERENCES

To view the "Capacity planning for Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001" white paper, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/server/techinfo/planning/Cap_Plan.asp

For more information about how to work with categories in SharePoint Portal Server 2001, see the "Establish categories" topic in SharePoint Portal Server 2001 User's Help. This topic is in the "Making content available for searching" section of the "Managing the workspace" chapter of SharePoint Portal Server 2001 User's Help.