Update: Product Generation – and WooCommerce is quite slow @120k products and variants

Product Generation

We use the very helpful plugin WooCommerce Plugin Generator for creating dummy products. It creates single and variable products, latter with different amounts of variants. Also, it generates product images, which get correctly added to the media library.

Speed of product generation depends on the server CPU, and also hard disc write performance. We scaled up the server to whooping 8 dedicated CPU, to see how much speed we can get. The CPU are not maxed out, CPU load is at approx. 100%-250%. With 8 cores, maximum is at 800%. Either the server config is not optimized for 8 CPU (which I don’t think). Or the bottleneck is now the disc usage. Server stats suggest a load of 50MB-150MB disc read per second, which I think is pretty much. I don’t know the server specs in that regard, though.

In the beginning, the product generation plugin measured a performance of 2.3 products per second.

First performance check

After some hours of product generation, we made a pause and checked the store’s performance.

We hit pause at round about 30k products and 90k variants, which is a quite high number of products for most shops. So let’s see how WooCommerce copes with that!

Well, the shop is already quite slow. On frontend, archive page loads fast, but filtering took about 10 seconds. In backend, similar picture: Product list page loads fast, but filtering takes long time.

Also, we found a quite unexpected issue: In backend, product edit page loads very slow, approx. 25 seconds. Same for post edit page! ⏳👀

We solved the issue by removing the custom field metabox via code. I’ll go in more detail in the next post.