I tend to get comments on my descriptions ranging from "Wow, excellent description" to "Dude, cut the spam!". My descriptions are of no particular fixed length because I use some code to build them, and they change as I change what I'm wearing/carrying.
The base, though, is usually a single paragraph of physical description that rarely ever changes. Things like hair, eyes, face, build...the sort of things that go in a police report outside of what you're wearing.
Where it gets long is when I start adding on the things I'm wearing, clothes, armor, weapons, jewelery, etc. Some of these are necesities. For instance, many games follow the "If it's not desced, you don't have it" rule for armor and weapons, to avoid someone wandering into, say, a hospital with undesced battlemech armor.
I also tend to very the individual desc parts in length depending on what it is. It may only take one sentence to say you're wearing ordinary black boots. If, however, you're wearing ceremonial armor of gold and silver coated in various painted designs, you'll probably want a paragraph to do the uniqueness of the armor justice. You *could* just say "wearing ceremonial armor of gold and silver coated in various painted designs", but that doesn't really create a mental image unless you're dealing with a game whose theme has already established exactly what ceremonial armor looks like with commonly known and available pictures.
Overall, I tend not to care about the length, but rather about giving a person a good idea of just what they're looking at. For a farmer who wears the same thing as most anyone else, I really only care that he *is* wearing pants, and maybe the color and material. On the other hand, a noble character wearing the finest embroidered silks and ornate armor justifies a desc that gives some idea of the detail of the items involved, and their grandeur.
And, in my experience, 80 percent of the people you encounter never look at your desc anyway. I can say this because I use a little code on most of my games that tells me whenever I'm looked at. And it only fires about 20 percent of the time. Unless you prompt someone to look at your desc, they'll most often just go by the RP. I've taken a character out in his pajamas by accident a couple of times, and absolutely nobody knew it because nobody bothered to look at the desc.
I myself usually look at descs the first time, but I'd venture to say there's no more than 20 people across my games whose desc I look at regularly. That's because most of us don't change them very often. Some never change the desc they started their character with. So there's not a lot of incentive for folks to get used to looking multiple times.
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