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Virtuemart - Large Inventory - Speed issue - Tips

Of late, we have had reports that SerrBizSEF is slowing down large inventory sites using Virtuemart. Large inventory is considered over 10K in products.

Some quick fixes to this issue are to limit the amount of Modules per page.  The more modules you have on any give page, the more SEFs that have to be generated.  Since SerrBizSEF is designed to minimize duplicate content, and Joomla has a horrible duplicate conent problem (17 URLS per item), you can see the issue. If one SEF has just 8 internal urls because of the various paths of navigation (3 menus - top main footer, front page and 2 modules - newest - featured), but the page itself has 100 plus "menu" and component links - we are looking at 1700 different queries that be accounted for for the page to be generated.

At moment, we are looking into a "caching" system and advanced PHP functions to solve this problem.

However, some short term options are as follows.

1) Minimize the use of modules.
2) Create and use ONE menu for generating the sef.  We recommend MainMenu.  Then, once the intial SEF has been created, add the SEF in the other menus as "Link to URL" versus link to component, content item, static content.
3) Turn off special functions like "pdf".
4) Use the default Joomla Caching system. (Be sure to clean cache when making changes)

Some users of SerrbizSEF have done this and site speed with large inventory Virtuemark has been improved.

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Pending Solution:
As we said, we are working on solution.  We are thinking to use a flat file "caching" system. But, we are open to User input during this planning stage.  If you have thoughts as to what the best solution is, please don leave your comments below.