Simple question–Is there a limit on how much you can write in the General or Fact Notes Sections?
So far I haven’t had a problem BUT I want to know for the future as I have a lot of info under general notes ( and in some cases a lot more to add) and would hate to lose it.
A couple of examples-- my 2nd cousin and his wife-- a report on just the 2 ( no kids etc) of them is 9 pages long in general notes. A report on just one ancestor of hubby’s lines in 556 pages long–336 in just notes..
Why–well besides regular documentation, I have patents, personal stories and lots of newspaper articles which a basic transcription only can get quite long BUT some of these news articles not only tell us a lot abt our ancestors but one tells me where my grandparents were living in 1920 after spending years looking for them as they are NOT listed in the 1920 census.
I also have times when I have included how I know this is the marriage record for
my 2nd g-grandparents - she used a nickname and he used his given name (which Ancestry still hasn’t figured out) so others don’t waste years trying to locate or how I know g-grandpa was murdered and didn’t commit suicide..
So that was why I was wondering abt the notes in facts-- I know Ancestry limits it to abt 100 words BUT other than that, would there be a problem?
As mentioned before by @thejerrybryan, the databases used does not impose a practical limit, but that’s only part of the entire software and many other aspects impact the usability (data model, UI components, validators, formatters, renderers, …).
I could not resist the temptation and pasted a complete text edition of the American Standard Bible into a note field of a brand new and empty database. Technically, everything worked and the 5 million character long text was saved successfully. However, the UI became unbearably sluggish - pasting, opening, resizing, scrolling,… each took about 20s on my brand new, well equipped Mac.
To find the practical limit, I tried with other text sizes and found that up to about 125’000 characters, everything is snappy and blazing fast. Above 125k, the perceived performance drops rather quickly and the limit I would consider acceptable for enjoyable work lies at about 200’000 which is equivalent to about 100 typewritten letter/A4 sized pages.
I do wonder what happens if you have multiple notes, none of which exceed your practical limit, but collectively which exceed your practical limit. I suspect but don’t know that performance remains acceptable as long as no individual note is too large.
For general comparison purposes, Excel .XLSX (spreadsheet) and .CSV (comma-separated values) are defaulted to max out at 32,767 characters per cell.
Some additional factors include processor architecture, storage media speeds, particularity of I/O operations invoked (read/write/edit/delete/local/network), file system caching/buffers/flushing, available process memory, priority/paging for other running processes, virus/threat detection, ETC.