Slow performance with thousands categories

[Ivan_Popovic]

Hi All,

our customer, want to show all 4500 magento categories/subcategories  in the top menu. In generally it works, but page loading time is ~12 seconds, what is really bad. If I disable top menu, loading time is 1.5 s.

Is there some solution how to increase magento with thousands categories? Some extension or top navigation customization? 

Would be possible do following:?

- in the top menu, should be pre-generated HTML code just for the first sub-menu level
- if I mouse-over some first sub-menu, another sub-menus (second, third level) should be generated by Ajax call

Thank you!

[MagenX]

you need to use FPC cache, and obviously 4,5k categories in menu is stupid....

[Ivan_Popovic]

We already installed Amasty FPC extension, magento works fast with standard categories number, but it is not solution for thousand categories.

Yes, I know that 4,5k categories in the menu isn't normal, but I am curious whether exists some solution. THX

[MagenX]

can you send us the link to your website, at least we can check it out,

or post webpagetest.org  test

cheers

[Ivan_Popovic]

Here are results from webpagetest.org
thanks!

[MagenX · Accepted solution]

ok, you have 25k DOM elements, no wonder. an everage site has about 10x times lower...

to be realistic you dont have to use submenus, keep only top categories. use some additional filters in layered navigation.

be more user friendly, do not load your whole shop on every page

amazon.com is a huge/big shop, but look at their menu

some minor issues:

you have to use GZIP, your page size is about 4Mb

combine/merge css/javascript

also separate your assets per domain, you can use CDN, or create a fake one with subdomains.

[Ivan_Popovic]

Thank you for your advices! We also found lot of issues in current template.

[magesolutions]

Maybe you need to clear all of log if you don't need. And bring log data to another database what will release a lot of space and speed up the database load.  More detail and other methods you can find this article about speed up magento