How much filtering?

[OllyBug]

Hi all.

Been playing with various ways to do the filtering on my site (very much work in progress) and started off using variables to classify my products into various groups ready to be filtered. However, I have run into some issues with this so have moved on and am now using product attributes and choices to create filters. My question is....How many attributes and choices can a browser process in a reasonable time (say 3-5 seconds)? I may have a section populated with 250 items each with 10 attributes. Each of these attributes may have between 1 and 5 choices. Obviously the section will be paginated but can the browser cope with this quickley enough based on the current script that Sellerdeck uses....Has any one done a similar thing yet?
This may be a silly question but I don't want to put hours into the site only to find out there could be an issue.

many thanks

[peblaco]

I've not done a test with that many products and attributes, however I have been working on a site which has about 270 products in one section with small images and filters by a couple of custom variables and the page was a bit slow. We made the filtering faster thanks to a fix provided by SellerDeck support for an issue on the server which required changes to scripts. However, on fast broadband the page can still take up to 5 seconds to load. The speed would depend on many factors. It's probably worth you getting in touch with the support team directly.

[OllyBug]

Hi.

Thanks for the quick reply. I am glad I asked the question now!

The filtering does involve 'all sections' . Other parts of the site will have sections that are controlled by just one or two attributes or a filter variable (as you have used). It was just one section that I am using lots. It is a 'find a herb' section whereby customers can use all the filtering parameters I have created to find a particular herb.

Anyway, I will ask support and will post back

Cheers,
Oliver

[OllyBug]

Update

Just thought I would post the first update - it may help someone else.

I currently have approx. 260 products which will be filtered. I started off creating 1 attribute per product and gave each of these 1 of 4 different choices..I have also added a further attribute to 87 products each with the same choice. As you can see by clicking the link.....it doesn't take too long, about 3 seconds (tested on a 2mb and 3mb broadband connection). However, Support informed me that searches are cached in the browser so once a user loads the page, as long as they don't delete their cache, subsequent searches/filtering will be 'instant'.

work in progress is here......http://bit.ly/1ad7hzQ

I am going to add many more attributes over the following few weeks so will update the post once I have added a lot more.

Support also hinted of a way to speed up the searches on the server. I have not tried this yet but will do at a later point.

Cheers,

[NormanRouxel]

The link in your post above won't work when clicked from above. It calls your sites cgi-bin and the scripts there use the calling page (in this case community.sellerdeck.com) as a base of their support files. Thus no stylesheets, images, JavaScripts, etc get loaded.

You'll need to give a link to a normal .html page and then directions to the filtered page.

[OllyBug]

Oh! I see what you mean!

here is the route:

http://www.norfolkherbs.co.uk/shoptest/index.html

click on find ideal herbs

cheers

[Hugh Gibson]

That loads very quickly here. The Busy image appears for about 1/2 second on first loading then for a fraction of a second on refreshing the page, as the filtering data is got from the browser cache. I'm on FTTC here.

When clicking choices, the filtering responds very quickly - almost instantly.

I think you could put considerably more products in filtering if you wanted to.

[peblaco]

Not everyone has FTTC though. I have a client who has a section with nearly 300 products. They have heard from customers in outlying areas where they don't have fast broadband that they had problems because the page is slower to load. You also get the problem of the "loading" graphic which disables clicking the page until filtering has loaded.

[Hugh Gibson]

They have heard from customers in outlying areas where they don't have fast broadband that they had problems because the page is slower to load.

Do you have a URL?

Have you enabled CGI compression on the server? That will considerably reduce the amount of data transferred and is one of the benefits of the cached filtering implementation.

Make sure that .json files are compressed (though this won't be necessary soon as we are moving to .js files for the data).

[peblaco]

I can email the details but it's already on a support ticket. They've supplied a fix to convert json to js so it has made it a bit quicker.