Are there limits to the amount of assets a folder can contain before performance is affected?

Question

We are working to restructure our DAM. I'm hoping to greatly reduce the amount of folders we currently have. I'm told, however, that if a folder contains too many assets it affects the performance of the system. Because of this we have more layers of folders than we logically need. For example, we use a lot of stock imagery. At the moment we have a folder for each stock house and then a subfolder in each of those for each year. I'd love to at least get rid of the years and put all of the assets from each stock house in their own folder but that would be thousands of assets in each one and I was told that would affect the performance of the system. Are there ways around this or do I really have to create a multilevel folder structure to handle simple things like this?

EstebanBustamante · Accepted Answer

According to this thread (https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-experience-manager/maximum-number-of-nodes-on-crx-aem-can-have-without-performance/td-p/550118), the limitation of 1,000 children under a tree was "true" for the UI and for AEM on-premise. However, with the AEMaaCS architecture, I am not sure if this limitation still holds.

There have been several enhancements this year (2023) to the Assets UI. One of the enhancements, as far as I can recall, was specifically aimed at handling a massive quantity of assets in the UI. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the release notes. So, if you are using AEMaaCS, it might be worth trying it out. You can ask your developers to create a POC (Proof of Concept) and confirm if they notice any performance impact. If you are unable to do this on your own, I think it's fair to submit a support case to Adobe and ask directly if this limitation has been addressed in AEMaaCS.

Overall, I believe it makes sense to avoid having such a large number of assets under the same folder. Perhaps you can consider restructuring the folders in a different way, maybe using a different structure other than dates, or implementing an archiving process.

Some release notes:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/content/release-notes/home.html?lang=en

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-experience-manager-blogs/aem-as-a-cloud-service-2023-4-0-release-update/ba-p/597992

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-experience-manager-blogs/aem-as-a-cloud-service-2023-1-0-release-update/ba-p/572924#M769

Adilos-Cantuerk · Answer

I asked this question an adobe employe a while ago.
The answer was "at exactly 1000 assets the performance drops".
My follow up was - "How much and at which rate this gets worse?" but i could not get any more satisfying answers here.
There was no way around this... but maybe we get another answer for the current version from an adobe employee here.
We are trying to avoid having folders with more then 999 assets.

Since we moved over to AEM, folders seem to be less and less THE solution.
Not quite irrelevant, but in many cases it was impossible to rebuild the old DAM within the AEM.
Tags and other metadata became more and more the reason people find the asset they were looking for.
Instead of using the folder structure to navigate somewhere, users tend to use the search bar...

The rule i advised here at our company for additional folders is:
Please try to avoid creating additional folder structures that are already built within the tagging structure or otherwise available metadata properties.
What year an asset was purchased / created in, or which stock house it was purchased from, all of this is better put into the metadata of the assets.

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