Index management - most crucial factors of indexing time

Question

What are the most important factors which affects the time of indexing ...

• product attributes
• product prices
• catalog url rewrites

and also the indexes for flat tables.

I know that the number of products and categories are important, but I want some advices about optimizing them and reduce the indexing time.

Also I want to know whether the index management gets better in magento 1.8 ce, rather 1.6.

Any advice is appreciated!

Answer 1

From my experience I can tell you that the number of attributes makes the most impact on indexing.

For example, I had the situation when all attributes(Amount:300) were added to the Default Attribute Set and all products(Amount:8000) used it.

It means that all products have all attributes in the system(Complexity of indexing in this case 8000*300). For real, some attributes had values only for 50-60 products.

As a result during saving or re-indexing Magento collects all product attributes and process them. Saving could last minutes and re-indexing hours.

My advice for you.

• Try to analyze your attributes and products.
• Divide them by types(For example shirts and T-shirts can have different attributes)
• Create different attribute sets.(Even if the only difference is one attribute, maybe after a month it will be more)
• Do not add attribute to all products, if only several require it.

Also try to use the latest Magento version. It contains important bag fixes and improvements.

Answer 2

After two days, I find something satisfying!! As you can see in this link ,There are a few parameters :

• having a lot of stores, would affect catalog_url_rewrites
• having a lot of attributes for products would make catalog_attributes or catalog_product_flat so slow.
• having many searchable attributes can affect on catalog_fulltext_search.

As a result, I think paying attention to infrastructure, such as removing unnecessary attributes or stores, or narrowing down the searchable attributes to minimum would help big time!!!

Also there are some server configuration or external indexing and caching tools which can accelerate magento websites. you can see them in the first link I said, or here or maybe there too!

finally, I find out that there isn't any change in indexing, in magento 1.8ce. But there is one big change in magento EE 1.13. So this can be a non-free solution!

Hope these things help you :)