Contact size limits and its impact on performance

This article will answer questions pertaining to whether customers can have more than 15M contacts in their portal, at what point are there serious performance issues, types of issues, etc.

Can a customer have more than 15M contacts? 

Yes. We have yet to prevent a customer from purchasing more contacts beyond 15M. 

How many contacts does our largest portal have? 

Our largest portal to date is our very own 53 portal with ~30M contacts. 

What kind of performance issues are expected to occur when having more than 15M contacts?

The public facing 15M limit that is in place today is mostly to protect the performance of tools like List segmentation, Workflows, and by extension, Reporting (many report are built on Lists).

It's worth noting that these performance issues can go beyond what the customer experiences (i.e. slow queries, delays in automation) and actually have the danger of bringing down our systems (i.e. critsits). I wouldn’t share that fact directly with a prospect/customer. 

That said, the internal recommendation is to stay under 50M in order to avoid serious performance issues. There will still be expected slowness even under 50M. 

Source: Jasmine's conversation with Anna Perko (Group PM of Framework Data Group) & Dylan Sellberg (PM of CRM) - Last edited 4/12/2021