Category with many categories slow admin

We add about 200 new items (and categories) a month. So I was looking at how to speed up our admin, and I was hoping someone here might have an idea.

Current category structure :

Top->

A-C->(is under Top)

(under A-C)(About 1,000 categories here, starting with a,b or c.)

And it is the same story for all the other letters. (d-f, g-i, etc)

Is there a better way to organize the categories? Purely from the admin perspective, as the customer side is represented differently. Currently it takes over a minute to load one of those large category pages. I ran an explain on the query and time was .003 seconds, with nothing else that I saw that I could remove.
Is the result set too large, that php looping over it to build the page is the bottleneck? Should I make the categories a, b, c separate under Top? What is he limit to subcategories before the page takes too long to display?

I have the category counts off... didn't seem to do much.
Thanks

I think seeing your site might make it easier to look for where the slow downs really are happening ...

Have you an URL that we could perhaps peek at? :smile:

Ajeh:

I think seeing your site might make it easier to look for where the slow downs really are happening ...

Have you an URL that we could perhaps peek at? :smile:

I'm afraid that it is only in the admin that the slowdowns occur.

I just wouldn't feel comfortable showing the world my admin...(I guess I am a shy guy...) I could PM you with a temporary one if you're interested, Ajeh.

We'd don't use the categories pages, or side box. So it really is semantically, what is the best way to organize (if such a thing makes a difference) or a strategy to improve admin categories load times. It would make no difference to the customer side of the shop...only my sanity in loading in all the items/categories.

You may PM me if you like and I can look in your Admin to see what might be used to speed things up ...

I tried also turning off the Category Dropdown by clicking on the red X next to it ... this helps some ...

But with 400-700 sub categories, a lot of it is drawing the screen ...

Without sitting down you your site and code it is hard to see what else can be used to speed things up ...

Smaller Sub Categories would help ... where instead of A-C you have A, B and C ...

I am assuming that you are not just blocking output but also anything used to obtain the information that you have turned off ...

I will try your suggestion with smaller subcategories.
But I guess when those are too big I'll just use Aa,Ab,Ac....
(I guess explosive growth like that would be a nice problem to have!)

I was hoping there was a 'silver bullet' for the admin, but I guess I'll have to save my silver bullets for werewolves.

I have to admit, I am a little confused:

I am assuming that you are not just blocking output but also anything used to obtain the information that you have turned off ...

I haven't done much customizing in the admin... and I turned off the counts, not just comment them out. If that is what you meant by blocking output.

Thanks again for your time, I'll hit up the tip jar on my way out....:cheers:

You could turn off the check for the Linked Products ... that would speed things up ...

So, I'll give a little update on what helped and how much.

Original: 60+ second load time.
turn off category count: 24 sec
Comment out check if linked: 17 sec
Click red x (category drop down): 16 Sec
YMMV, this is from memory, and could be + or Minus...

We are on a VPS host

Which is a pretty good improvement, but I am still not happy, and I really can't have the linked off...

I'll post back when I get stuff moved to Smaller sub cats.

So I took the other suggestion and made my subcategories smaller, and now the page loads in 7-12 sec with the counts on.

Which, for me, is adequate at this time.

Thanks again !

mdegrandis:

So, I'll give a little update on what helped and how much.

Original: 60+ second load time.
turn off category count: 24 sec
Comment out check if linked: 17 sec
Click red x (category drop down): 16 Sec
YMMV, this is from memory, and could be + or Minus...

We are on a VPS host

Which is a pretty good improvement, but I am still not happy, and I really can't have the linked off...

I'll post back when I get stuff moved to Smaller sub cats.

Oh my. Who is your VPS host? What were the query times for page and database? Add them to the avoid list either way. Im working on a 386 128gb ram test server with 5000+ items in 300+ sub cats and getting under .4s every query. Took me awhile to find a legit host that doesnt spoof specs. You get what you pay for.... had to find out the hard way.

gmerdan:

Oh my. Who is your VPS host? What were the query times for page and database? Add them to the avoid list either way. Im working on a 386 128gb ram test server with 5000+ items in 300+ sub cats and getting under .4s every query. Took me awhile to find a legit host that doesnt spoof specs. You get what you pay for.... had to find out the hard way.

That's nice...

Mine is more like 27 cats most having 400+ sub cats to that... My shop has over 4700 categories and 8800 Products.

Does your admin load that fast? Do you have categories that are built like that?

Actually that is quite a large test server 128 gb...

mdegrandis ... you A-C category produces almost a 2MB page each time you go to it ...

That means it has selected from the database, which is actually pretty quick, then it has to be downloaded to your computer before it appears on the screen ...

On my server, the page draws faster than I can scroll down to the bottom Category ... so a lot of your delay is also related to your hosting ...

Best that I can suggest are the smaller Categories per letter rather than grouping your letters, to help improve the speed ... and if that is still too slow, you would need to break down your letters in to smaller subsets ...

mdegrandis:

That's nice...

Mine is more like 27 cats most having 400+ sub cats to that... My shop has over 4700 categories and 8800 Products.

Does your admin load that fast? Do you have categories that are built like that?

mdegrandis:

Actually that is quite a large test server 128 gb...

Mdegrandis, I didn't mean to offend, I just felt that the point needed to be made that your hosting/connection might be the problem. It's all on speculation, obviously. Our test server admin goes faster than my brain can process.....should give you some hope.

I wish I had a 128gb ram server. :P

gmerdan:

Mdegrandis, I didn't mean to offend, I just felt that the point needed to be made that your hosting/connection might be the problem. It's all on speculation, obviously. Our test server admin goes faster than my brain can process.....should give you some hope.

I wish I had a 128gb ram server. :P

Actually I should apologize. I am usually not that touchy. I am sorry.
I also would like 128gb ram server...so if you hear of a deal...
I do appreciate the hope.
I have been looking into better connection for the office. I am lucky if I get 4 megs to our host, and it is constantly Rsync 'ing in both directions....
Our pipe is supposedly 5 meg with 2 up...but think we might be over utilizing that...