What is the max number of sections per course?

[ibagdasa]

Does anyone know if there is a limit on the  number of sections per course? Can we have 60 sections with 1650 users in one course?

[tdelillo · Accepted solution]

We once had a course with about 900 sections and about 30,000 users. So that is POSSIBLE, but it was terrible. Everything was slow to load, but the gradebook would crash completely.

We broke those into courses with 100-200 sections, and around 5000 students. Those worked much better.

I think your scenario will work fine.

[bneporadny]

 @ibagdasa ‌ 

After search the community I came across this post from a few years ago where someone asked a similar question and was answered by  @scottdennis ‌.  Canvas does not have an upper limit to the number of sections allowed in a course. 

https://community.canvaslms.com/message/11462?commentID=11462#comment-11462 

[Stef_retired]

If anyone who is currently experiencing difficulties with large courses loading in Gradebook comes across this conversation, please add a response here that includes a tag to Deactivated user‌ along with the URL to your Canvas instance.

[bdalton_sales]

Tangentially related there is a hard limit of 200 groups per group set.  Although you can have multiple group sets to work around this.

[victoria-maloy]

FYI - At one point I ran into a limit of 10 sections in the "View Gradebook Section" filter.  I don't know if that is still in existance or not.

[tdelillo]

I just checked one of our larger courses that has 50 sections, and they all appear in the section filter in Gradebook.

[bdalton_sales]

There has been a lot of scalability work done on the gradebook.  And the new gradebook make that even better. I haven't seen any hard limits on the numbers of sections yet.  Will do some testing when i have time

[Robbie_Grant]

 @ibagdasa ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie