Catalog search performance

The catalog search feature implements what is known as a vertical schema search. That is, it searches it searches through tables in which data is stored 'vertically' in name/value pairs, rather than horizontally in predefined columns. This flexibility impacts performance to some degree though as the data is not optimized for searching. Generally, the simple catalog search should not perform appreciably slower than you would expect for a simple text string search. Most customers will not notice any significant delay between launching their search and obtaining results, except those delays caused by common Internet traffic. The advanced catalog search may perform noticeably slower. Due to the complex SQL queries that are generated by the underlying databean, the searches can take considerably longer. The response times should not make usage of the feature prohibitive in most cases, but your customers should be aware that there are many factors which can adversely affect performance. Response time will increase accordingly with the size of your database, number of attributes, result set size, database configuration, hardware, memory, among other factors.

Note: It is strongly recommended that you test drive your queries before putting into a production environment.

Fortunately, there are some techniques that you can employ to improve the catalog search performance: