A particle effect that fails to terminate generates this error: maxNumFrames exceeded 5570652.
That would tell me that time is less a determining factor then frames. For instance, if the particle is 10 frames per second, you should be able to run it for 9284.42 minutes.
This is of course based on the assumption that this error is based on a per effect basis and not a cumulative one for all effects running at the same time.
Very curious to see the results of this.