Project server 2003 Maximum activity amounts

[Andrew Hansen]

Hey people i want to know if any has found a maximum activity amount before
project server starts to grind????? i have an up comming project with in
excess of
1.5 million activities will project be able to handle it???

and i would also like to know how many activities are required for a 1 MB
MPP file???

and would project server be able to handle this load as well

thanks

Andrew Hansen

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Andrew:

I don't think anyone can manage a single Project plan with 1.5 million
tasks. If this is can't be broken into component parts, you're asking for a
world of hurt.

 

[mark.everett]

Andrew -

Basicially, what Gary said. I suspect that Project Server could handle
1.5 million rows but I think the performance would be so poor as to be
unusable. Not a slam against Project or Project Server; I have used
other tools (Primavera, PMOffice) and they would either not be able to
handle it or would be too slow.

Are these very detailed activities? I think you should examine whether
you want people reporting at that level of detail. You may also
approach this in phases, breaking the 1.5 million tasks down to logical
activities over several project schedules.

As regards your 1MB question - that's hard to answer. A lot depends on
the number of resources and the number of custom fields and custom
outline codes. Typically, I start seeing 1MB file sizes between 600
and 1100 tasks.

Hope this helps.
Mark S. Everett
www.quantumpm.com

 

[Andrew]

Gary why post some thing to a question when you dont even answer it

Mark Thank you

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Andrew --

I believe that Gary answered your question, even if you don't like the
answer. In fact, to expand on Gary's original answer, Microsoft Project's
limit on the number of tasks per project is 1 million tasks. Therefore, the
software cannot even handle your 1.5 million task project. Gary stated it
correctly: if you cannot break up your giant project into smaller
subprojects, then you will be in for a world of pain with the software.
Hope this helps.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Andrew:

I thought I gave you sound advice. The specifics of your questions are quite
ridiculous really. Don't you think that "start to grind" is a subjective
term at best? Please give us your technical definition and, gee wiz, the
specs for the machine on which you're planning on running your million man
plan and maybe someone could give you something more substantive. As for the
1 meg file, well this could happen with ten activities, again, depending on
what you mean by activity. Are you referring to tasks or assignments? Are
you talking about data transactions? Do you resources in your plans? There's
no particular formula for this.

My suggestion is that you try to limit your plan size to a couple thousand
rows at most. Not all of those will be "activities" by any definition you
might come up with, and that might or might not cause bumps and grinds on
your system.