Many of us already know the story with the 5,000 item limit with lists/libraries and some strategies to work around this limitation.

A lot of administrators when faced with the familiar “the number of items in this list exceeds the list view threshold” will naturally navigate to Central Admin and modify the Resource Throttling for the Web Application.

• Select the proper web application and then General Settings -> Resource Throttling.

• Once in the Resource Throttling page, you can adjust the list view threshold for users and admins.

Be careful when doing this because when you select the web application, the settings affect all list and libraries in that web application.

PowerShell to the rescue

SharePoint administrators with PowerShell privileges you can modify thresholds on a list by list basis avoiding web application wide thresholds.  There are a few things to consider.

1.  The “IsThrottled” cmdlet is a Boolean that indicates if a list has been throttled.   Consider the following command:

$web = get-spweb http://sp
$list = $web.lists[“test”]

$list.IsThrottled

This will always return false for lists fewer than 5,000 items (or central admin settings if overridden)

2.  As soon as item 5001 is added then normal users will see the “this view cannot be displayed because it exceeds the list view threshold” message on the top of the list:

A couple things to note when the 5001 mark is met:

1. When an administrator accesses the list, they will still be bound to the list view threshold set in Central Administration. In our example it’s 20,000 so they see the list items fine.

2.  When you re-run the PowerShell command above, now the Boolean value returned is true, indicating the list is now being throttled.

3.  To disable list throttling for the specified list, run the following PowerShell command:

$web = get-spweb http://sp
$list = $web.lists[“test”]

$list.EnableThrottling = $false
$list.Update()

4.  Now when you run the $list.IsThrottled command, it will return false, indicating the list is no longer being throttled.  Users will now be able to see all the items in the list without the error message.

Resources:

• Query Throttling and Indexing
• Manage Large Lists and libraries in SharePoint