Today I needed to do some testing around large lists, views, queries, etc as I’m working with a proposed feature. I realize there is a lot of documentation around this in terms of keeping a view under 2000 items, or not having more than 2000 items in any folder.
These are recommendations that have been backed up with data, however, sometimes nothing beats just testing everything out for yourself. How is my farm or this feature going to react when a list gets too large?
I found the SharePoint 2007 Test Data Population Tool that enables you to quickly load up your farm with test data.
MOSS – http://sptdatapop.codeplex.com/releases/view/1214
WSS – http://sptdatapop.codeplex.com/releases/view/1141
There are certain features that are available in WSS that aren’t in the MOSS version, so even if you have MOSS, you’ll probably want both. This tool made in very easy for me to fill up a test list with as many items as I wanted with 3 short lines in an XML file and a simple command point to the XML file and the URL to the site containing the list.
There is a ton of additional functionality in these tools also as far as creating sites, site collections, load testing, etc. that I haven’t even begun to explore. So, if you want to do some testing around what your SharePoint farm can handle, I would recommend adding this to your tool belt. Just make sure you don’t run this against a production farm if you are testing the limits 
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