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There is no fixed limit for how long your survey forms can be. On mobile devices, the primary limiting factor will be your data-collection device: if your form is too long for your device's CPU power, it may become very slow, and if your form is too long for your device's memory, it may crash.

See Choosing the right device for factors to consider when choosing a data-collection device.

To get an idea of how different devices perform with very long forms, you can test devices yourself using a sample form with 500 fields, a sample form with 1,500 fields, or a sample form with 3,000 fields.

Note that when you upload a very long form to the server, it may take several minutes to process. Note also that when you choose to fill out a very long form in SurveyCTO Collect, it may take a long time to load; once it has been loaded once, however, it will usually load substantially faster when selected again.

Generally, you can shorten a very long form by using repeat groups, and/or by splitting it into multiple forms linked on the back-end with a unique ID (perhaps implemented using a scanned barcode). If survey modules will always be filled out in sequence, you can even link forms automatically in your back-end processing code based upon their start-time, end-time, and device-id values.

There are other things that you can do to improve a form's performance. See Optimizing form performance for some ideas.

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