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4.12. HelpSpot Limits

Updated: 5 Oct 2026, 04:21 PM EDT

HelpSpot has several built in limits on record counts and various other operations to ensure good performance and prevent mis-configuration from negatively impacting the system operation. Some of these limits can be adjusted on self-hosted instances using configuration variables.

• Max Note Size - Each note in a request is limited to:
  • HelpSpot 5.8.7 and later: 500,000 UTF-8 characters. If a note is longer, HelpSpot keeps the first 500,000 characters and adds a notice to the note saying it was cut short.
  • HelpSpot 5.8.6 and earlier: 70,000 UTF-8 characters. Longer notes are cut off with no notice, so the end of the message is missing without any sign it was there.
  Notes this long usually come from emails with heavily formatted content, such as tables pasted from Excel or Word, where the formatting code is much larger than the visible text.
• Max Request History Records - Each request is limited to 1,500 request history items. When this limit is reached a notice will be displayed staff members alerting them to the issue. This limit is configurable via the cHD_MAX_REQUEST_HISTORY setting in the HS_Settings table.
• Full Text Searches In Filters - Full text searches in filters are limited to 2000 results on MySQL and 5,000 results on SQL Server
• Automation Rule Matches - Automation rule can be run on a individual request for a maximum of 50 times.  This limit is configurable via the cHD_MAX_AUTO_RUNS setting in the HS_Settings table.
• Custom Field Creation - Creation of custom fields is theoretically limited on MySQL based installations by the maximum column count of the InnoDB storage engine.
• Filter Date Limit - The Filter Within Previous (days) setting found in Admin > Settings limits the number of days back a filter searches for records. By default this is set to 365. You can change this setting in the settings area or you can add a date criteria to your filter to override the default limit.
• Max Results to Display - The Max Results to Display setting found in Admin > Settings sets how many requests load at once in filters and search results. Filters, and detailed search as of HelpSpot 5.8.7, show a Load More button to page through the rest. In HelpSpot 5.8.6 and earlier, detailed search stops at this number. See Search.
• File Upload Size - Limited to 100MB for an individual file on HelpSpot Cloud. This is customizable with server settings on self hosted installs.