10.7.2 Server - Address book sevice limits ?

Question

Ok, wondering if anyone has run into this?  According to Enterprise support there are no limits to the number of contacts or groups for the address book service.  I seem to have found otherwise.  A customer running Lion on his iMac.  Had some 42,000 contacts and maybe 1000 groups running on his local address book with no problems.  He got a MacMini server which I have setup. 
Having never heard of any limits I told him to just start moving the groups from the local address book to the server account I had setup on his iMac.  It choked at around 400 groups with 9600 contacts total (according to address book).  Called support went through everything, cannot find a reason why it stopped propagating new contacts/groups.  So I go and setup 5 different groups to shrink the size of each address book.  So that is working fine and they are moving things over.  But he called today with the same problem.  Turns out the last address account group of contacts/groups had many more that what he had indicated.  So it choked again, showing around 10,100 cards.  Same symptom, adding a contact and/or group does not propogate out from the server.  Needless to say he is not very happy.  Back when we started I told him this was uncharted waters for me since the largest I had setup at this point has been around 2000 or so.  The support rep I had talked to also had never run into anything so large on Server.

Answer 1

Thank you for responding Bruce.  Ok, here is the scenario in list format.
A - Prior to Lion Server setup
1.  EU has a iMac running Lion.  Address book is a "On my Mac" copy.  Contains about 42k contacts and 1k groups.  Another tech came out but, unfortunately, was not capable of setting up Lion Server.
B - Server setup - round 1
1.  When I got out there I was unable to log into the Server app or the Server Admin tool, but, oddly enough could get into WGM.  At any rate, since nothing had been properly setup on the server, I just did a nuke and pave.  No problems with that. 
2.  Ran all of the updates, installed Server Admin and WGM.
3,  Setup VPN, local file sharing, and address book services.  Created an account on the server for the contacts, verified can log in ok and can add that carddav account locally on the server.
4.  Setup the same account on a MBP.  Had no problem connecting to the server.  Had the EU's assistant start moving groups, one at a time, from the "On my Mac" address book to the server account address book on the MBP.  Making sure it propogated completely before starting on the next one.  She started with the Z's and worked her way up the alphabet.  Each group may have anywhere from 2 to over 100 individuals.  The individual contacts have very little information in them, basically name, a date, email address, organization name.
5.  I had them setup a second MBP with the same account to verify that the server is propogating the additions to the server account.  She would move a group on the primary MBP and then check the secondary to see that it showed up. 
6. The first time it failed she noticed that the accounts moved from the "On my Mac" to the server account on the primary MBP.  Then the group would not be propogated to the other MBP.  Setting up the server account will also stop at the same place.
7. You can move the groups back out and try adding just a single user and/or a single group.  Same symptom, will not propogate out from the server.  To me this means that it is hung up in the que on the primary MBP so it is not actually hitting the server.  There were no errors on the MBP or the server logs.  About 9600 users and 400 groups.
C - Server setup round 2
1.  Since we were unable to migrate all of the contacts and group to one address book I decided the best course of action was to break it up into 5 different address books - Z-W, V-S, R-N, etc.  The thinking is that this will make each address book smaller and cause fewer problems.  So I created the accounts and had them repeat the process as in 4 and 5 above.
2.  The second MBP is showing the information  being propogated.  I had also setup up one account at a time on my Mac at home to monitor.  Everything is working fine until we get to the last group, FF-AA.
3.  It turns out that his A group alone has some 4-5 k contacts alone.  So we end up with the same symptoms as in 6 and 7 above.  Except this time it hit around 10.1k before it stopped propogating.
4.  Same symptom.  They can remove the non-propogating groups out of the MBP.  Attempts to add a user and/or group post to the machine locally but do not hit the server and therefore no one else gets it.
D - Server setup round 3
1.  Created one additional group of BB-AA, truncated the other to FF-CC, and was able to complete the transfer of all groups and contatcs to thier respective new group.