title: MongoDB Single Document size limit is 16MB
body: <p><strong>Known Information:</strong> Its is know that MongoDB stores in BSON (<a href="http://bsonspec.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Binary JSON</a>) and the <a href="http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/limits/#limit-bson-document-size" rel="nofollow noreferrer">maximum BSON document size</a> is 16MB.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Question:</strong> Why 16MB itself why not 32MB or 64MB or still more and where exactly the limit has been put for 16MB and what are the reasons to depend on exactly 16MB?</p>
  
  <p>It is mentioned that during transmission, excessive amount of bandwidth will not be consumed and does not require excessive amount of RAM at server. But What if we can afford the network bandwidth and RAM memory consumption. Then also, we are left with no option other than <a href="http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/applications/gridfs/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">GridFS</a>. Why?</p>
  
  <p>It may sound stupid. But please could anyone put some bright light on this?
  <hr>
  <strong>Update:</strong> It was 4MB and now 16MB. </p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10061115/mongodb-bson-size">mongodb BSON size</a></p>
  
  <p>We can check it on Mongo Shell by issuing following command</p>
  
  <pre><code>db.isMaster().maxBsonObjectSize/(1024*1024)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Why it is not allowed as configurable by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_administrator" rel="nofollow noreferrer">DBAs</a>?</p>