Adding Extended Info Pages is very slow

[BevS97]

Has anyone else got this problem? We have a thumbnail for all our products and then a popup extended info page with a larger picture. I was finding it took ages to add new products - importing from a CSV file was taking hours even for just a handful of products. (and that's not an exaggeration, it was taking upto 2 or 3 hours)
I have now discovered that if I don't tick the 'extended info' box then I can import a huge csv file in a few seconds, and adding products manually by hand is very quick too, but as soon as I go back to add the extended info page it is take a long time to add each one.
It takes about 10 seconds to open the Extended Info tab, and around another 10 seconds once you hit the box and hit apply. 20 seconds might not sound much but when you are adding 100 products it adds quite a lot of time just to go down a list and tick one box on each product.

[NormanRouxel]

Weird. I help some sites that everyday build the entire content tree from an Update / Replace with hundreds of Extended Info pages in each import. No problems noted there. You may be doing Import / Update so that may operate differently.

Look at the size of ActinicCatalog.mdb (in Site1). If this more than 10 - 20Mb it may be that it has grown overlarge due to repeated imports (I don't know why but it seems to grow to hundreds of megabytes over time if you do many imports). If so, do Housekeeping / Compact Database. I'd also backup all of Site1 first just in case.

[Jan]

Are you autogenerating product references? You can check this on view / business settings / on the options tab. If so this can slow down new product creation and csv import. To get around this, switch off the auto rerference allocation and use your own references, this is a better thing to do because people like Froogle require you to use the same reference number and if you autogenerate and select the replace option, their is little chance that the same number will be generated.

Regards,

[BevS97]

I do use the autogenerate product references. I use import / update rather than replace - we have about 6000 products, and so I am just normally importing new ones rather than amending the old ones. When I tried the replace option once when i wanted to change the price on about 100 products, and i managed to delete the other 5900 - so now I only use it to add new products.

I did wonder about the auto generate product references, but surely it auto generates them when it creates the initial product which is quite fast, when you are doing the the extended info page the product ref is already generated. I will do a little test though and turn off that feature (just not sure how I will keep track of what product ref number to use for each product)

the catalog is about 23 meg

[BevS97]

I should also add it's slow even when adding the extended info pages manually, it's not just the imported ones.

[Jan]

The delay you are seeing is definately related to the autogenerate product reference feature, unless you switch it off and use meaningful product references you will continue to see this delay.

When creating products online you will probably find that the first product created is slow and then the rest created in that session are fine.

With regard to update V replace when importing, you should only replace if you have a whole new catalog to put in place, update will change existing products to have the new info specified. Update will not remove products no longer in the import file though - if you need to do this, you need to include the whole catalog in the import file and use replace when importing.

Regards,

[BevS97]

On the import side of things, I have run 4 tests, adding 75 items.

Using 'Auto Gen Product Ref' and no 'Extended Page Info' is very very quick - couple of seconds.

Manually generating Product Refs and again no Extended Page info is also very quick, no noticeable difference.

Manually generating product referencs and creating extended page info takes a couple of minutes - maybe 3 or 4, but you can see the count is working and it get's there eventually

Auto Generating Product Refs and creating extended page info takes ages, there is no indication anything is happening, the screen tends to go white and it can take an hour or two.

It does seem the Auto Generate Product references makes a difference when you are using Extended Page info -but it's only when you use both that it really grinds to a halt.

I'd prefer to use Auto Generate because I don't currently have any sort of system for Product References, and if I create one (using the barcode leaps to mind), then I will have to update the entire database to make it consistent.