We say that a Lie p-algebra L has finite p-subalgebra rank if the minimal number of generators required to generate every finitely generated p-subalgebra is uniformly bounded by some integer r. This paper is concerned with the following problem: does L being of finite p-subalgebra rank force ad(L) to be finite-dimensional? Although this seems unlikely in general, we show that this is indeed the case for Lie p-algebras in a large class including all locally, residually, and virtually soluble Lie p-algebras.