Upper limit on data stored for a single item?

This might sound ridiculous, but I'm trying to enter a publication with 217(!) authors into our database. The publication is a single item, and the authors are in a repeater. After the 190th author, it seems like I can't add anymore information to any of the fields in the item; if I try to save new data, I stop getting the green bar at the top. The data stays in my browser cache, but isn't getting written to the database.

Do you think this limitation is related to my database, or is it built into Perch?