How to add lots of users to a site, to a list, or to a document library in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and in SharePoint Server 2007

This article contains information to help administrators and site users to add lots of users to a site, to a list, or to a document library in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployments.

The maximum size of a SharePoint discretionary access control list (DACL) is 64 kilobytes (KB) or approximately 1,820 access control entries (ACEs). Exceeding the 64 KB limit can have a negative effect on the performance of features such as Search and Alerts. We recommend that you do not target the maximum size in your planning.

To add lots of users to a site, to a list, or to a document library, we recommend that you add the users by using domain groups instead of adding users directly or adding users to a SharePoint group. You can use domain groups to reduce the number of ACEs in the SharePoint DACL for the site, for the list, or for the document library to optimize performance.

For more information about the DACL size limit in Windows, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 166348  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/166348/ ) Maximum number of ACEs in an ACL

On a server that is running SharePoint Server 2007, a combination of the following errors may appear in the crawl log if the 64 KB SharePoint DACL size is exceeded:

Error message 1Error message 2Error message 3