I'm still having major problems with configurable products and page load speeds. I have a configurable product with 530 associated products, each with around 4 custom options.
I'm also using SCP, but I don't think this either responsible or helping my load times, so am currently kinda ignoring it.
I have run the page profiler and this particular product takes 9.9 seconds to load, and the biggest (if I'm interpreting it correctly?) culprits are below:
__EAV_COLLECTION_LOAD_ATTR__ - 3.9239
CONFIGURABLE:Mage_Catalog_Model_Product_Type_Configurable::getConfigurableAttributes - 4.8121
TTT2:Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Product_Type_Configurable_Attribute_Collection::_afterLoad - 4.5175
CONFIGURABLE:OrganicInternet_SimpleConfigurableProducts_Catalog_Model_Product_Type_Configurable::getUsedProducts - 4.5157
It seems the problem is "Magento" rather than the additional module as most of the time taken is on core Magento methods, if I'm right. As such is this just a limitation of configurable products? i.e. for a highly variable product, it's wise to keep to only a few associated products (which kinda defeats the object and is actually extremely limiting). All of my products are highly configurable, hence the choice, however I didn't realise it was so slow.
Is this a configuration issue, or a hardware issue, or will I just have to rethink the whole situation. Even if I upgraded hardware presumably it may speed up slightly but wouldn't be scalable and should that product ever increase in it's configurability the same "bottleneck" would be reached.
Is it the custom options attached to the product causing the issue and as such the actual configurable part is fine, it's just once you start loading up options?
And to finish, if you were tasked with creating a store where, for example, a "Candle" could have 1000 different permutations, i.e. colour, size, shape etc, and still maintain a scalable fast solution?
Any thoughts and ideas are appreciated on this as I initially posted a while back and was a bit vague, but have since done a bit of profiling and believe I've located (some) of the problem, just how to fix going forward.