Is there a maximum number of products?

[mash]

I have look through the help files plus the Actinic website, can not find the answer.

I would like to know if there is a maximum number of products that Actinic can handle. Would it get to a point where the software would grind to a holt. Site would have just text no images.

Interested to know, if anyone can help, would appreciate it.

Best regards Mash

[allen]

AFAIK there is no maximum, or if it is, it's probably stupidly large.

The only thing to consider is that (very) large catalogs can cause problems with the 'link to product' drop-downs in the brochure. (They take ages to gernerate the list).

Allen

[Jan]

If I remember correctly is it 10000 or so, and even then it is just recommended. What will happen is that is will to run more slowly as the limits are reached. I think that large numbers of orders in the catalog slow it down more that large numbers of products - haven't tested that personally yet though ;-).

[note] fill in your homepage url so that we can all go and buy our spring plants (please).

Regards,

[mash]

It could have up to 23,000 product lines! So a few, there is a number of natural sections within that (possible site selling office stationary).

A catalogue that size, what are the possible problems.

As requested by Jan for all your organic plants, please go http://www.organicplants.co.uk . We are please with the site, positive step forward!

Look for to your comments, take care Mash

[Jan]

Brilliant, I was expecting flowers but it's actually vegetables which is even better - perhaps this year my veggie patch with prosper (all I did last year was provide a cafe for the Yorkshire slugs) :-)

My main worry about having 23000 products is how to divide them up into sections and make them easy to find - you might be better off with several specialist catalogs instead.

Regards,

[mash]

Pleased you like, picking fresh pepper from a greenhouse is excellent they are so sweet, quite different to the supermarket!

With stationary, there are natural sections I feel, so dividing them up should not cause a problem. At the moment it is aimed at running on an intranet of two PCs, lateral thinking going on. A customer calls up, logon as them, process their order by the office staff.

Concern, speed, too lateral! Unsure.

Any thought / concerns, would like to hear them all.

Take care Mash

[paulh69]

seems to be a limit of 65,535 nodes in the index

[Jan]

Eek! Have you got that many products then or are you just looking a max values somewhere in the code?

Regards

[paulh69]

well, not quite that many actual products!

in reality about 4,000 in stock and 14,000-19,000 available.

I have a program to update the actiniccatalog.mdb from our suppliers main database of 210,050 products, recently the selection rules weren't quite and it put around 121,211 products in the actinic database.

actinic catalog took around 10 hours to generate the site and give an error message though!

for what it's worth, there seems to be a limit of 10,000 products in a single catalog section - although that generates a page >20MB!

[Jan]

That explains why it takes you a long time to update your site - I have been wondering about that for ages.

Regards,

[paulh69]

having around 14,000 products it does take a while to generate the site

the only other problem seems to be more chance of the merge index thing failing so I remove the diff index files from the site1 directory always uploading fulltext.fil and fullprod.fil

number of products doesn't affect the speed of the search script too badly but the search highlight script has problems if any product page gets much larger than 100K.

haven't quite managed to automate uploading the site yet, seems to stop with pages include "SRC=" files outside of catalog warning message - they don't...

but they do use a LINK to the privacy policy which seems to trigger the same error?

[Jan]

I get that error. it because of pages I include in my brochure pages, I have to hardcode the full path to them and even though they are in the catalog directory they are not recognised as such.

[fx: time travels back several months ...]
what you need mate is a stock control mole :-) it sorts that error out quite nicely. :-)

Regards

[aolmos]

AFAIK there is no maximum, or if it is, it's probably stupidly large.

The only thing to consider is that (very) large catalogs can cause problems with the 'link to product' drop-downs in the brochure. (They take ages to gernerate the list).

Allen

Hi! I have this problem. The users can search my 40000 products database, but when they happen to find a book in a section having lets say 1000 products, Actinic will generate a script error. Does anybody have a fix for this? I will split sections, but anybody knows the maximum number of products a section can manage in order to avoid that link to product problems?

Angel

[wjcampbe]

Rather than worrying about the limits and trying to max out just below them, does it not make more sense to approach this from the customer's viewpoint? Surely you want to split your items down into logical groupings that will let the customer find what he/she wants quickly and efficiently. That will also help you when it comes to search engine positioning as you will have a better structure for optimisation.

Just my 2c worth.

[fleetwood]

Hi Paul

the only other problem seems to be more chance of the merge index thing failing so I remove the diff index files from the site1 directory always uploading fulltext.fil and fullprod.fil

As the merge error is the most common one I receive (we have around 8,000 products online), please could you clarify the workaround you mention (above).

Exactly which files do you remove, and do you mean you delete them from the Site1 directory on your HD, prior to starting an upload, or do you delete them from the server?

thanks
Martin

[paulh69]

the actual cause of the error is generating a site and failing to upload it to the merge data stage - the local index files then go out of sync with the site. quite why actinic still fails to detect this and fix it by automatically uploading the full index isn't clear.

It would mean a change to the upload process to either send the index files again if the merge fails - bearing in mind that the local diff and prev files are no longer correct, or perhaps do checksums on the files on the server and see if they are as expected before generating the site.

[aolmos]

Hi!

I finaly solved the highlight problem, but now I'm sure that I reached the maximum products number. My bookshop has more that 100,000 titles and I get an error creating the word index, that can't handle more than 65535 nodes. Even when the customers will not be able to search the whole catalog, does Actinic allow me to upload it?

Angel

PD: The site is www.discantus.com

[Bruce]

Hi,

This is a Monster Catalog !! You should not have a problem uploading the site, if the upload / merge goes through.