How does the number of products affect magento/server performance?
I am considering deleting unused products in a magento multistore setup as I am only using 1 of the stores. I have over 25K skus but only using about 1k.
I am using magento 1.7.0.2 and have read about some catalog rewrite bug which can cause some slow queries.
Best Answer
What it affects the most is the indexers, not only the URL rewrite index, which indeed has a glitch in CE, and disabling products does not remove them from the index. Also, price index, attribute index for layered navigation, search index, and flat article index. Incidentally, those grow about linear to product count * store view count, so you should consider deleting your unused stores as well.
Indexing performance also is affected by the number of combined products (bundle, configurable), number of categories, number of customer groups, and number of filterable product attributes.
It's not unusual for a full reindex to take several hours, so I'd definitely recommend optimizing it where possible. Also, partial reindex is affected, which means with fewer products, saving a product in the backend will be faster (if the indexers are configured as "update on save")