Is there maximum product limit.

First let me appologise if this information is avail elsewhere, but is there a product limitation as in number of products that can be created in an install.

IE. Some Ecommerce portals or solutions limit you to only 40 or 100 products, before i install nopCommerce i would like to know if there is a limitation like this.

There's no any limits on number of products. But we have some performance issues with a large number of products. A bit of customization can solve this issue.

when will the performance go down, is there any measurable records for references?
hope 10K products will not affect the performance.

<-- 100,000 products.  

But might have to switch to other software if I can't get it to work on Server 2K8R2 :-(

10K products can't work fine, i think for now.
for this condition you may need a dedicated server with at least 4G memory,
maybe the cache mechanism of nopcommerce need to be updated,

a simple way to measure,
check the usage of memory in task manager while opening the site.
for windows 2003 : "w3wp"

@ a.m

what performance issues occour with lots of products? What is the threshold and how is it overcome?

Thanks