A paper by researchers from the National Library of Medicine ("Testing
the Scalability of a DSpace-based Archive") finds that DSpace can
support an archive with a million items. The tested system "is built
upon MIT's DSpace software (Version 1.4), with some modifications and
enhancements to better facilitate batch based processing."

Here's an excerpt from the conclusion:

    We conclude that the version of DSpace used in SPER (with MySQL
database) shows acceptable ingest performance for a million-item
archive. . . .

    The experimental results shown here pertain to items with mostly
one or two monochrome TIFF images, though a few items have up to 100
images. However, a number of inferences may be derived from these
results.

        * No real problems were found in ingesting a million items to
the archive, using a Sun X4500 server machine, in terms of either
performance or reliability of the SPER/DSpace software architecture
and implementation. . . .
        * With the increase in archive size, the average ingest time
of an item increases in a smooth and predictable way.
        * With increasing number of TIFF images, the ingest time (per
item) increases by three to four percent for each additional image.
        * If color TIFF images were used, the ingest times would
increase slightly due to the overhead of copying additional data to
the upload area, and to the archive's asset storage. However, other
archival overheads should not change.

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Fuente: http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2008/07/18/dspace-can-sup...