Support

The list limits are provided by Joomla itself. Do note that it doesn't make sense adding list limits as high as you wish. Not only this many records have to be loaded to PHP memory, they also have to be rendered into HTML (also in PHP memory) before being sent to the browser. According to my experience, a site with the typical 128MB limit on PHP memory can render around 250 to 400 records before PHP runs out of memory.

But this is irrelevant. A solution to that has existed for the better part of the last decade. Go to Extensions, Plugins. Edit "System - Admin Tools". Set "Maximum security exceptions log entries" to the number of records you want to keep (recommended: 1000). Give it a day of normal site operation.

Remember that 500 article titles are very different than 500 security exceptions, reasons, IP addresses and associated information that needs to be loaded, processed and rendered into HTML. Moreover, do keep in mind that we write our software to satisfy the overwhelming majority of uses cases, not just your case which happens to be the easiest one (128MB PHP memory, light site without tons of plugins that gobble up RAM, Joomla's debug mode disabled). I can tell you for a fact that on my very light test site with Joomla's debug mode enabled I can't display over 400 or so security exceptions and I definitely cannot display 500 articles. Do remember that limits can be changed using the limit query string parameter in the URL (that's how I tested it). Also note that my dev site is actually pretty lightweight compared to virtually every client site I had to work on. So, a limit over 100 is completely out of the question.

However, as I already made it clear, it's irrelevant because 500 items on a page (or even 100 come to think of it) is completely pointless. You are not expected to delete old log entries by hand, that would be absurd. You can not process a list that's 500 entries long either. Anything above 20 to 50 entries (depending on the list) is beyond human cognitive abilities.

Now, I understand why you argue about this, thinking that Joomla had a point for putting a limit of 500. Actually, no, they don't and it doesn't even work even on my very lightweight dev site. So why did they do that? Joomla has taken the architecturally wrong approach of putting this kind of massive and inoperable limits on its lists to handle batch processing. However, they only did that because they are incapable of doing basic software architecture and / or use common sense. The problem they're trying to solve is that given a set of filters you have hundreds or even thousands of articles you need to batch process (e.g. move between categories, assign a language, delete...). The correct and smart approach would be to add a checkbox in the batch processing dialog in the spirit of "Apply to all items matching the filter". It's something that literally every major e-mail client has implemented about 15 or so years ago.

So, to sum it up. Large limits are wrong and don't work. Joomla did something stupid. I won't implement someone else's stupid approach to an architecturally incorrect solution. I have a smarter, architecturally correct solution in Admin Tools that predates Joomla's stupid approach. I will stick with my solution as it causes no problems ;)