How big should one map be?
And that's not really the moon!
what we should be debating really is how many puzzles and what average play time should a map be, because those are the things that really count
Well, from what I can tell from my beta-tester playing and his rough estimate, about 6-8minutes each. Personally I'd say its a little less on the first map, and a little longer on the 3rd.
For about the 15'th time... when you have a leak, the water acts like when you are looking a the outside world in-game.
I'm not saying add water into your map and release it... i'm saying jsut add water in for testing... since it detects when there is a leak, you will know to fix it and will reduce the size of your map.
Right, I'm not saying that water doesn't display incorrectly if there is a leak. My point is that there are much, much better methods of figuring out if (and where!) you have a leak.
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i think you should differentiate what is a whole map, with what is just a section...
for example, in level 19, you get to see the "loading" message a few times, as you are switched to the next map. and if you were to noclip from within any one of the sections, you would never get to see the entire level, which i presume is much too large, overall, to fit in memory all at once.
so i think the real question is, how large, in lets use one floor square as a unit of measurement, can a single, loaded section of map that is all in memory at one time be?
or to put it another way, if you were to draw a room as large as possible, just how large would that room be?
i'm sure that if you draw such a room, you can have a door at the edge, that leads to another loaded section of your "map," which if i read the above messages properly is really referring to a bunch of small maps within one master map file.
that all said, i'm not sure if "size" is really the limit here, more than the complexity contained in a map... but i'm not all that familiar with hammer and mapping in general, so all i can do is observe from a player's perspective. and so when i have fallen out of maps, and have watched rooms as i've fallen away from them, i can get quite far away from those rooms (below them) before they stop being drawn, so i'm thinking the limits are big enough to pretty much deal with an entire outdoors environment that's quite large, but i don't have any specific numbers...
The cake is a PI
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I'm up for coop games & beta testing your maps...
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Just to clarify, there are four escape maps in all.
1.) testchamber19 then testchamber5 then introduction to pistons
2.) a ton more pistons
3.) introduction to rocket turret
4.) big turret fight and glados
Of these four, #1 is the single map that is the largest. Meaning that from the time you enter testchamber 19 to the red hallway after the first piston puzzle, you are on map "testchmb_a_15" and it is something like 52MB.
The grid supplied in Hammer, which I would expect directly correlates to the maximum possible coordinates in a map, is 32768 units from absolute max to absolute minimum. So that means that the largest single room could be 32766 units cubed.
For reference, an average ceiling in Portal (where you can place two portals vertically on a wall, nearly exactly) is 256 units high, and the glass room that you wake up in at the beginning of the game is 256 units square.
That being said, I will use this first post on the second page to make the following request:
Leck, let us know what you mean? Size with regard to actual dimensions of the map or filesize?
Aslo, when you compile your map you can view map limitations in terms of models, brushes, etc.
For instance: brush limit is 8192; however, you also have to consider the brushside limit , vertex limit and memory limits etc.
FYI, 1 game unit = 1 inch. But don't go thinking you can build an exact duplicate of your house or something, stuff doesn't come out right when you translate it exactly.
Also, the grid may be +/- 16384 units on all axis, but it's good to stay a good 2048 units or so away from the actual edge of the map. Stuff tends to disappear around there for some strange reason, so the farther away from there you can build, the better.
To get an idea of how big a map can be that is built to fit the entire grid, load up the City 17 map from the end of HL2, where the big Strider battle is. If I recall correctly, that map is right near as big as you can build a map on the X/Y plane.
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I pretty much meant everything, basically :p I've mapped a lot but never released a map, so I don't know what is a good file size.
Also how big an area could fit into one map, or when you should split into two files with level transition.
Also, when submitting map that's one area, would it be okay to have that in several separate files?
Everyone's responses have been very helpful, generally what I've been doing now is keep mapping in one file until it laggs really badly, then I know I should split it up 
You probably just need to use hint brushes, area portals, func_detail, etc if you are having lag issues. There are a number of goos optimization guides floating around.