Product Option Limits?

I would like to find out what the product option limits are?

Or if you have not tested that part can you tell me what the usable record limits are?

I was in the process of adding options to a single product in my store and managed to kill the store completely. The pages simply won't load anymore. I checked the database and the productoptions table is up to 20k records, the products table is at 2200.

This is due to the reference method used for product options I am guessing. I have a single product in the store, the product has 8 options with 4 choices per option. (basically it's a configurator).

The problem is in the way we do options in order to maintain inventory on them.

The issue is that if you have 8 options and 4 choices per, you will end up having

4 to the power of 8 products 4 to the power of 9 product options in the productoptions table.... which really slows things down... in your case to a halt. The precise number probably depends on your computer statistics, but really more than a couple hundred combinations will begin showing clear performance problems.

Our solution will be to handle "uninventoried" options differently in the next update of powerstore. By not worrying about inventory we can drastically simplify the database structure and how the system works. Unfortunately there is little you can do it he current version without hand coding to get around the problem with large numbers of options.

Do you have an eta on when the next iteration is expected?

I can re-structure the database without a problem but making sure I incorporate the changes everywhere in the PHP would be a task for me.

Would it be possible for you to have 8 products to take care of the first 8 options and then add options to each of the 8?

So instead of:
Widget, color, size, etc.

You could have:
Red widget, size, etc.
Blue widget, size, etc.
Yellow widget, size, etc.
etc.

That would simplify it quite a bit.

Due to the way the options and products are stored wouldn't that be the same thing?

Unless I am missing something I would still have the same number of records?

Is there a way I can take inventory checks out of the picture completely? Inventory tracking is not something I need currently.

I'm not real sure how options are stored, but the tree would flow up to 8 points instead of everything flowing up to a single point. I would think that would greatly reduce the amount of data processed per item.

This is from an earlier post from Dani Chankhour:

"If you don't want to use Inventory, then just make sure to check the Unlimited Inventory check box. If you want this checkbox always checked, then add this to your check box input field (line 477 of your product insert page):

checked="checked" "

It will likely be several months before a new version will be publicly available. We are just beginning development.

Unfortunately, even if you don't use inventory, the database structure is set up to support it and you will run into this limitation.

By creating 8 products as suggested, it will make it 8x faster to load an individual page, but you will still have 4 to the power of 7 iterations, which would probably still slow things considerably.

You shouldn't have to account for it "everywhere"... you should only need to account for the updates in the admin section when updating options and in the details page, but that isn't to imply it would be simple for someone without pretty extensive knowledge of code and database design to figure it out.