Checking maximum number of features for shapefile to be opened in ArcMap?

Question

I have a shapefile that contains 10,608,268 polyline features.

What is the maximum limit for records that a shapefile can contains?

Answer 1

From the ArcGIS Desktop help on Geometry limitations:

There is a 2 GB size limit for any shapefile component file, which translates to a maximum of roughly 70 million point features. The actual number of line or polygon features you can store in a shapefile depends on the number of vertices in each line or polygon (a vertex is equivalent to a point).

I echo the comment of @Vince:

There are several dynamic buffers involved. I could construct a geometry which was too large to fit in a single [shape], or two that would cause the second to overflow. In your case, 4000 bytes of attributes would prevent creation over 536k features, no matter how many vertices. Note that this isn't a limit of ArcGIS but of the shapefile format itself. My recommendation: Don't use shapefiles. They are archaic, with too many limitations with modern datatypes and volumes.