Is there a limit of elements that could be stored in a List?

Question

Is there a limit of elements that could be stored in a List ? or you can just keeping adding elements untill you are out of memory ?

Answer 1

The current implementation of List uses Int32 everywhere - to construct its backing array, for its Count property, as an indexer and for all its internal operations - so there's a current theoretical maximum of Int32.MaxValue items (2^31-1 or 2147483647).

But the .NET framework also has a maximum object size limit of 2GB, so you'll only get anywhere near the items limit with lists of single-byte items such as List or List.

In practice you'll probably run out of contiguous memory before you hit either of those limits.