Price groups * variants = slow?

[Kent Multer]

Hi folks,

I didn't go to MivaCon, but in watching one of the video lectures, I recall something about a known problem in the store, where page loads are slow when using predicted discounts on products with lots of variants. I think one of my clients is running into this. They sell clothing items that have two or three attributes, such as Length, Width, and Color, so some products have over 100 variants. When we applied some price-group discounts to this, the pages started loading rather slowly; it's especially bad for category and search pages, 6-10 seconds to display a dozen products. By temporarily deactivating the discount module, I was able to confirm that it's the discount processing that's causing the delay.

How can we work around this? I think the client will be willing to remove the price display from the CTGY and SRCH pages, but I don;t see an admin setting to disable the discount processing. Is there a way to do it?

Thanks --

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Three questions; are they up to date, what theme are they running, and, if they updated immediately after the most recent patches came out, you'll want to check, or have their host check (or us if it's hosted here) that the database character collation is the same for all of the product, category and page-related tables in the database. There is an issue we've found in stores that have been around a long time where if the store was created on a server where the default MySQL character collation was different than the current default, tables can end up with different encoding, and that can create a performance issue.

[Kent Multer]

Hi David -- The store is up to date, running Merchant 9.00067 on Engine v5.26, and the Suivant theme. I'm not sure when it was last updated.

I looked at a few tables, and the collation is "utf8_general_ci" for all the character columns that I checked. Do you have a specific list of the tables that need to be checked, or should I just open a support ticket?

Thanks --

[ILoveHostasaurus]

The important ones would be s0x_Page*, s0x_Prod*, s0x_Cat* and then any related to ready themes, s0x_ReadyTheme*