maximum number of rows that can be shown on tableview

This Cocoa with Love blog post is very informative - it looks at the performance of a table view with thousands of cells.

The question is whether it has some internal hard limit - it's seemingly enough for most needs - the above post concludes:

The iPhone can handle tables with 100,000 rows — and it continues to scroll as smoothly as though it were only 100 rows.

There seems to be no maximum. You don't insert actively anyway, you just implement the delegate methods to serve the cells - they are not loaded all at once if done properly.

Just having tried it with one thousand custom cells, it worked without a problem. But with 3k even with index it is a lot to scroll, I'd consider putting them into a navigation hierarchy (but this heavily depends on your use).

One more thing: Make sure to be efficient when drawing the cells, i.e. implement drawRect: instead of cluttering the cells with labels, views etc., this will make scrolling much faster.

You will ultimately be limited by the fact that all the methods such as numberOfRowsInSectiin take integer arguments but hopefully you won't need to approach those limits :)