Majorly configurable products taking for ever to upload

[mario_vosloo]

Hi there,

Can you guys give me some advice please?! First of all, I am not a developer at all - I am making use of someone and he has developed a great website. The situation however is that I have very few products on my e-commerce website but some of them are majorly configurable.

To give you an idea... A single one of these products ( and there are multiple) has four attributes. Each of these attributes have a varying amount of values: Attribute one = 20, Attribute two = 11, Attribute three = 7, Attribute four = 8 

Initially it was decided that I was to upload my own products but when it came to these huge configurable products the session timed out the whole time - my developer then said that he would load the products for me because he has to push or force something to make it happen...

Now please note that I do understand the products are very big and will take some time to upload as each variation of the product has to be generated on the back end. The problem though is that its been weeks and my developer has only uploaded 1 of these big products and some of the values of the attributes aren't even showing. (It may be that he is just plainly not working on my stuff but yeah)

Is this normal and if not, how long should such a product take to upload. I mean, we live in the twenty first century - it shouldn't take long in my opinion!

[Robert Rand]

Hi Mario,

While there may be extenuating circumstances that I'm not aware of, this does not sound normal.

If your Magento site is timing out while you're uploading or inserting products, you may have some sort of a hosting bottleneck that needs to be addressed. That could relate to hosting configuration or hosting resources like RAM or CPU. 

When you're entering products, I'd also recommend keeping an eye on any photos that you're including. These should be sized and compressed to load quickly. This will also help keep file sizes smaller, which can cut down on upload time (and potential failures).

More importantly, your developer should not need to push or force something to get products inserted into the site. If, for instance, you're uploading from a spreadsheet and have some bad data (ex. special characters like !$%^&* in a field they don't belong in), there's a reason why Magento won't accept them, and they shouldn't be manually forced into the database. I'm not sure what he's forcing, how he's doing it, or why, but Magento is built to accept product data without needing to force anything.

I'd recommend asking for clarity on exactly what he's doing and why. If you're not satisfied with the answer, it may be time to seek additional help, whether for web development, web hosting, or both. Magento is a great platform, but it's only as good as the experts supporting it.

Best of luck!