Adventures in 5000 Item Document Library Limit - SharePoint Office 365

There have been numerous posts on the 365 Grid regarding issues with SharePoint Document Libraries in Office 365 when 5000 items are in the library. This weekend, I decided to see for myself what the issues are and ways to resolve them.

First, I created a document library and placed 5000 documents in it.

I then received this error message from the web part on the front page of my team site:





The first solution is to create a view with less than 5,000 items for that view. I created a Limited View that only displayed a total of 30 items. I then changed the web part on the home page to utilize this new Limited View but wait....... the error message is still the same!

Not a problem, I will go into Explorer View and remove some documents - yet Explorer View opened but does not dispay any items.

First solution: Get the number of documents in the Document Library to less than 5,000.

I selected the 5000ItemLimitLibrary link on the home page (simply click on the name of the library on the SharePoint site) and went directly into the Document Library. The documents in the Document Library displayed properly.























Select the checkboxes next to the Document names in the Document Library (or select the checkbox next to the Type option at the top) and then select Delete Document.

This will need to be done until the number of items is below 5,000 - after that, the web part on the home page displays properly:



Second Solution: Utilize folders. In this situation, I created a folder titled "Folder" and copied over a couple thousand documents. The web part still displays on the screen and there are more than 5,000 documents total in the document library. Approximately 2,000 in the folder and 3,500 in the remainder of the library.


I hope this helps and I am open to any other possible solutions to resolve this issue. I am going to be doing some testing about what happens when a folder has over 5,000 documents in it and will report back those results in the upcoming days.




Comments

Unknown said…
I have 5000 items in a document library but my view returns only 800 odd items, still I see its saying that I am pproaching List view threshold. Any idea why ?
Unknown said…
I have 5000 items in a document library but my view returns only 800 odd items, still I see its saying that I am pproaching List view threshold. Any idea why ?
John Ventry said…
Yes, because in a document library limiting the number of items by a view doesn't address the issue. In your case, folders or document sets would need to be created so that more than 5,000 items could be added to a document library. If you create a folder and place 4,999 items in it, the message should go away.
Unknown said…
I have a folder at root level with 450 document sets and 3813 documents in them. Still I see the error message in library settings as - The number of items in this list is approaching the list view threshold, which is 5000 items. This threshold is the limit at which tasks that cause excessive server load (such as those involving all list items) are prohibited. Please help.
John Ventry said…
Can u send me an email using the link on the home page? I can then try to work through this with you.
We have sharepoint 2013 hosted environment and we stored 1 million items in a single list and it only shows the 5000 item limit warning. But we are able to do everything in that list and create list view webparts, inline editing. We are scaling to 6 million.