Subsites limit in a flat hierarchy in a Site Collection in SharePoint 2010

Question

According to SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management article , We can have total 250,000 sites in a site collection.

I see some suggestions over the internet (like here)not to have more than 2000 subsites flat under a single site.

I want to know if we can create 250,000 directly under the root web or need to organize them in hierarchy such that no of subsites under a site < 2000. Do we have any recommendation from MS in this regard?

Answer 1

The "Capacity Management" explicitly states that 2.000 is a threshold:

Subsite | 2,000 per site view | Threshold
The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well as the number of subsites surpasses 2,000. Similarly, the All Site Content page and the Tree View Control performance will decrease significantly as the number of subsites grows.

Note that a threshold is defined as:

Configurable limits that can be exceeded to accommodate specific requirements

This means that you can go over this limit if you have specific requirements AND that you thoroughly test your solution. With that said I do not think you should exceed it - rethink your design.