Configurable swatches slow site down

Question

My store was extremely slow on the product pages and after a little bit of debugging I found that the product swatches were causing the problem.

I've checked the server error log and the max_execution_time exceeds with the following code snippets:

/app/code/core/Mage/ConfigurableSwatches/Helper/Data.php

public static function normalizeKey($key) {
    if (function_exists('mb_strtolower')) {
        return trim(mb_strtolower($key, 'UTF-8')); // The line the error refers to
    }
    return trim(strtolower($key));
}

/app/code/core/Mage/ConfigurableSwatches/Helper/MediaFallBack.php

$optionLabels = array_map(function ($value) {
    return array_map('Mage_ConfigurableSwatches_Helper_Data::normalizeKey', $value); // Error
}, $optionLabels);

My client does prefer to have the swatches enabled on the site and the swatches are used for three attributes, but how can I solve the executing time problem or just generally speed up the swatches?

I'm using Magento 1.9.1 with the default swatches and the site runs on an nGinx server

Answer 1

There are many performance issues with the swatches. Try my module https://github.com/wigman/AjaxSwatches. It takes out the swatches and loads them using Ajax.

Answer 2

i've found the following solution Enterprise 1.14.1 Swatches causing 35 sec plus load time on category pages and it reduced the loading time of the page with 10 seconds