Capacity management - Web application limits

The following table lists the recommended guidelines for Web applications.

 

Limit	Maximum value	Limit type	Notes
Content database	300 per Web application	Supported	With 300 content databases per Web application, end user operations such as opening the site or site collections are not affected. But administrative operations such as creating a new site collection will experience decrease in performance. We recommend that you use Windows PowerShell to manage the Web application when a large number of content databases are present, because the management interface becomes slow and difficult to navigate.
Zone	5 per Web application	Boundary	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. Exceeding 20 managed paths per Web application adds more load to the Web server for each request. If you plan to exceed twenty managed paths in a given Web application, we recommend that you test for acceptable system performance.
Solution cache size	300 MB per Web application	Threshold	The solution cache allows the InfoPath Forms service to hold solutions in cache in order to speed up retrieval of the solutions. If the cache size is exceeded, solutions are retrieved from disk, which may slow down response times. You can configure the size of the solution cache by using the Windows PowerShell cmdlet Set-SPInfoPathFormsService. For more information, see Set-SPInfoPathFormsService.
Site collection	250,000 per Web application	Supported	The maximum recommended number of site collections per Web application is 250,000. Note that this limit is affected by other factors that might reduce the effective number of site collections that can be supported by a given Web application. Care must be exercised to avoid exceeding supported limits when a container object, such as a content database, contains a large number of other objects. For example, in a farm that contains a large number of Web applications, the total number of site collections might reach a number that cannot effectively be supported by farm resources. This can be true even when both the number of Web applications per farm and the number of site collections per Web application fall within their supported limits. Similarly, if a farm contains a smaller total number of content databases, each of which contains a large number of site collections, farm performance might be adversely affected long before the supported limit for the number of site collections is reached. The following case illustrates this point. Farm A contains a Web application that has 200 content databases, a supported configuration. If each of these content databases contains 200 site collections, the total number of site collections in the Web application will be 40,000, which falls within supported limits. However, if each content database contains 2,000 site collections, even though this number is supported for a content database, the total number of site collections in the Web application will be 400,000, which exceeds the limit for the number of site collections per Web application