We installed Tainacan and it has been working great for over 2 years in our library’s digital archive. Of course, with your wonderful support! We had the crazy idea of migrating the entire library catalog to Tainacan. This catalog contains over 600,000 items. Will Tainacan be able to handle so many items?
It does depend a lot on your server settings but in any case above 20.000 itens I would say that Tainacan will suffer. WordPress database and its post types and post meta structure is not very well prepared for this amount of items, specially if each contain a good amount of metadata. We do have some suggestions to improve it:
Unfortunately, that page is not translated yet to English, but you can ask us for some guidance here in case of any doubts.
We do have knowledge of some websites with a large amount of items. In all those cases, the use of the ElasticPress plugin is essential. However, configuring it is not merely plug and play. Also right now we are working on making Tainacan compatible with their latest version, because they changed a bit how things are indexed internally. Hopefully by the next month we should have that solved.