An interesting post by Rob Garrett about avoiding using SPList.Items.Add() – as referencing SPList.Items causes you to get all items in a list, and that can be pretty slow. He does suggest a solution.

I must confess, I’m surprised. I mean, what he describes makes sense – and also explains why have both SPList.ItemCount and SPList.Items.Count (same problem – and the former should be faster) – but surely there is some equivalent already build, some SPList.AddItem() to do it for you? Guess not.

Might be a small optimisation, but it starts to become clearer why the 2000 item recommendation…

At some point, I’ll try and generate some metrics, and then we’ll see when it becomes more efficient and how much so.