Query throttling is a new administrative feature in SharePoint 2010. It allows farm administrators to mitigate the performance issues associated with large lists by restricting the number of items that can be accessed when you execute a query (known as the list view threshold). By default, this limit is set to 5,000 items for regular users and 20,000 items for users in an administrator role. If a query exceeds this limit, an exception is thrown and no results are returned to the calling code. Out-of-the-box, SharePoint list views manage throttled results by returning a subset of the query results, together with a warning message that some results were not retrieved. Farm administrators can use the Central Administration Web site to configure query throttling for each Web application in various ways.