What is the maximum storage capacity of a plist?

Question

My application uses a plist as data storage, and I would like to know, what is the maximum storage capacity of a plist file in iOS?

Answer 1

A plist can be of arbitrary length.

Apple, however, only recommend plists having a maximum size of a couple hundred KB:

"For situations where you need to store small amounts of persistent data—say less than a few hundred kilobytes—property lists offer a uniform and convenient means of organizing, storing, and accessing the data."

For data which is more memory intensive, they recommend the following:

"In some situations, the property-list architecture may prove insufficient. If you need a way to store large, complex graphs of objects, objects not supported by the property-list architecture, or objects whose mutability settings must be retained, use archiving."

Answer 2

plist is a file format. It is only constrained by the maximum file size. The way it's read and written poses another constraint: the memory available to hold serialized objects.