Large Store with large # of Categories - better to Link or Copy Products?

[Emily1972]

Hi,

i have been given the job of loading a large product catalogue onto zen-cart and I'm looking for some advice on the best way to do it.

I have a catalogue of approx 800,000 part numbers across nearly 20,000 categories/ sub categories.

Unfortunately i wont be able to significantly decrease the number of categories so i'm focusing on the products.

Which of the following is the best option to organise them - or what option have i not even thought of

I'm thinking along the lines of what would be easier on the server to speed up page loading.

i can organise the products so each product page would have one attribute name and about 60 attribute values.

Or i can upload about 100,000 products and link them to the categories

or finally i can just upload 800,000 products and not have them cross link.

Which is the best of these options?

I appreciate your comments and suggestions

[iddy]

I'm setting up a shop with approx 400,000 parts and 14,000 cat/subcats so for what its worth my experience is as follows....

Stay away from cross linking and attributes if at all possible. i've tried the combinations you mentioned and having individual products seems to be the fastest.

With so many categories the front page is still slow to load so I'm now trying the following.... set up the categories as normal then disable them (enable all products), use/rename the "About Us" plugin to add links to the "more information" sidebox to access the categories directly.