I am planning to save huge number of ids for foreignkey ids in this array. So, I am just checking what would be the max number of BSON::ObjectIds I can save in the field array. Lets say for example
department_ids: [BSON::OBjectId('57cf6d6e8315292136000001'), BSON::OBjectId('57cf6d6e8315292136000002') ...... ]
16MB is big enough to hold really large amount of ObjectId, ObjectIds aren't that heavy, they are 12 bytes and when you divide it by 16MB you get well beyond 1 million.
But in case you still aren't assured, you can benefit by the flexible schema design of Mongo and create one follow-up document to hold further arrays and store the _id of that document in the concerned document with a field named as "followedBy" or something.
downside is you will have to execute a follow-up query (or maybe not).
Hope that helps.