Break permission inheritance on large list – The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator.

When trying to change a document library permission and break the inheritances, you may receive this error if your library/list item count exceeds the threshold, which is 5000 by default . The error will provide the following information after expanding the Technical Details link.

thershhold error

Checking the list first – check to see what is the list record count and what is the threshold. review document library settings page :

thershhold error 2

In the above example you can see the list exceeded the 5000 item limit.

How to resolve:

  1.  Increase the threshold in central admin, not recommended for long term since it may have performance impact on the farm. That being said, you can change the threshold make your change and revert back to the original threshold. you can follow these steps :
    • Open Central Administration.
    • Go to Application Management > Manage Web Application and select your web application
    • In the Ribbon, click on General Settings drop-down and choose “Resource Throttling”.
    • In the “List View Threshold”, increase the value
  2. Change the List View Threshold for Auditors and Administrators value. based on the first approach this will allow to increase the threshold value only for Administrators.

thershhold error 3