>>>5000 labels is easy to reach if you are using the label mechanism
>>>extensively.
>>
>> This is real life with critical editions in the "classical" style
>> where footnotes don't refer by footnote marks but by line numbers.
>> ednotes.sty originally used three labels for one footnote
>> and broke with, say, 400 pages.
>
> A LaTeX translation of the largest of the four religious texts
> (English language) in Jon Bosak's 1998 XML demos might reasonably have
> at least 24000 labels.
> See http://www.ibiblio.org/bosak/
> http://metalab.unc.edu/bosak/xml/eg/rel200.zip
Here is the conditional fix that I am placing in perpage.sty. It is not
all too pretty, but I think it should do the trick as long as LaTeX is
not fixed, and do nothing once this happens.