Practical limit on ArcGIS Server folders?

[MattMcGuire]

Is there a practical limit on the number of folders and services in ArcGIS Server? I know that there are supposed to be n services running depending on how much memory you have available. This is not that issue.

I have a large number of services set to use 0 instances (large number of infrequently used services) on one ArcGIS Server installation. To manage the large number of services, there are a large number of folders. Anyway, services are really slow to publish and fire up, even though CPU and memory are barely above zero. I'm guessing that one process - using java - is used to sorting through the list of folders and services when I fire it up, and that this process doesn't scale well. Does any one have any specific knowledge about what the affects of a large number of folders and services are outside the issue of consuming memory? And/or if there is something I can do to manage that more efficiently?

Thanks

[MattMcGuire · Accepted solution]

Well, I was able to publish about 700 services before the publishing service started to crash - ArcGIS Server 10.2.2. In this case, I need to publish a large amount of services each with minInstance of 0. This is very easy on the RAM (unless someone actually starts using the services

400 services on a very small server (two core, 6 GB RAM VM) is no problem. But 700 services, even on a much larger  12 core machine with 16GB RAM , begins to affect the publishing service - . It starts to take an increasingly  long time to publish each service, CPU usage spikes (javaw.exe) and then the publishing service eventually fails somewhere above 700.