I got one of the these days fairly rare comments to the Collutions site (wss.collutions.com) and this time it was asking if I could I do anything about the amount of stuff that is being accessed when the "Articles - 2007 Products" default page is being loaded.

My first reaction was to think that I'd in effect already solved this in the mirror site (wss.wssfaq.com) by splitting off the Web Casts (and similar) from the Articles - 2007 Products list into their own list (thus reducing the total number of items in the list) and that - because the Collutions site was about to have a re-vamp anyway (including a long overdue move to being based on WSS 3.0) - any change could wait.

However today, I thought "why don't I give him something in the meantime?" and made a "Latest 20" View which is restricted (entirely) to 20 items and made that the default view.

At first sight it didn't seem to make that much difference. A bit snappier maybe but not excessively so. But then I started adding New items to the list (which of course meant that every time an item was added the default page was opened) and suddenly that snappiness started to really mean something.

Now, despite having had sites that use the SharePoint products since early 2002, I've never really seen the point of that final option for Item Limit when creating a View ("Limit the total number of items returned to the specified amount") because I always so far have wanted to be able to click on Next and see some more. Well now I do. Snappiness!