I supposed this is a well known feature, but I was asked more than once about it, so it’s better to write something here to clarify the confusions.
If you have some very, very big catalogs, you probably have seen this “notification” in Catalog UI
By default, the Catalog UI groups a product and its variations in a parent-children view (they are not exactly parent-children, by the way). However, to do that, it needs to know about all the entries in that specific category. If it’s a small category, it should be no problem, but if it’s big one, then it’s inevitable slow. The lazy loading which the catalog content list only loads the contents when you scroll to them is not helping in this matter. Moreover, the grouping introduces an overhead for the UI, and having too many groups can severely affect the performance. Trust me, you won’t like a sluggish UI.
This improvement was introduced way back – 7.11 if I remember correctly – thanks to my colleague Magnus Rahl. To this day it’s still valuable – the performance was improved – but not that much to remove the threshold completely (And the improvement to the catalog versioning in Commerce 9 should have nothing to do with this).
When you see this notification, and if you’re unhappy with it, you have two (primary) options: Either to sub-categorize your category – i.e. introduce sub categories so each will have a smaller number of entries. Or increase the value of threshold.
Each approach has its own disadvantages. Sub-categorizing might break your SEO, while the second approach will undoubtedly effect the UI performance. Your call!
Now – the tricky part – which number to configure in SimplifiedCatalogListingThreshold setting. Obviously, it must be greater than the biggest number of entries in a category. But how to obtain that number? I’ve seen the confusion to raise that value to 3000, 5000, or even 10000 and it’s still not working. No, you can’t guess, you have to know for sure.
One simple option is to look at Commerce Manager Catalog Management. There is a small text in right corner of the list which shows the number of entries in that category (No, it’s not available in the Catalog UI, but I assume it would be helpful?)
The nuke option is to look at the database. Usually we recommend to avoid manipulate the database directly, as it can be dangerous – but here is a little code which only queries data (so practical harmless)
SELECT CatalogNodeId, Count(CatalogEntryId) FROM dbo.NodeEntryRelation GROUP BY CatalogNodeId ORDER BY Count(CatalogEntryId) DESC
Now you know the biggest number of the entries in a category – just change the threshold in setting. Try it and see if the UI Performance is acceptable to you.
An option where you could switch to a flat version of the category view might be an option here. For very large catalogs you would only see the entity itself and not the associated “sub” entities. Instead you’d need to open up the entity and switch to the associations tab.
It would significantly improve performance for large catalogs but of course with the tradeoff that you’d need to click into another view to reach the “children”.