Category Module Helper Performance Issue

Hi guys,

We’ve run into a performance issue with the VM category module override.

On a site with around 500 categories and 20.000 products, even on a very fast server, this part alone takes about 10–15 seconds to execute on the first load. After some debugging, it looks like most of the time is spent inside this helper file when building the category tree and product lists: plugins/system/vmuikitx_override/html_override/mod_virtuemart_category/helpers.php

When temporarily disabling this override, the page load time drops back to normal.

So it seems the category/product aggregation logic in the helper doesn’t scale very well with larger category trees.

Although Joomla’s cache helps to some extent, it gets cleared relatively often, and the performance hit is quite noticeable — customers have already reported slow page loads.

Is there a way to optimize how the product counts are calculated in this helper, especially for larger category trees?

Environment: Joomla 5 + VirtueMart 4.6.4

Thank you in advance

We have a limited testing environment to debug a scenario like this so kindly share the site credentials for trouble shooting the actual issue. Thank you

We’ve modified the multiple SQL calls used to build the category tree (child categories). I’ve attached the updated —please review the file and confirm the results at your end.Note: It’s recommended not to use this in the production environment before thorough testing. Thank you

 

Hey guys,

Did you get a chance to check this?

Hi we will check this. thanks

Hi,We updated the changes in the module, but there were some issues. Those issues are fixed now.Can you please check the attached file and let us know if everything is working fine on your site?Thanks.

Hi,

thanks for integrating the earlier helpers.php change (no sortSearchListQuery per category). That part looks good.

First uncached load of mod_virtuemart_category with the VMuikitX default layout was still 5–6 seconds here (557 published categories, seo_full=1). After module cache it was instant. Another instance of the same module with a custom flyout layout did not show this delay.

What we found: the layout calls JRoute for every category in the tree. With full SEF, VirtueMart getCategoryRoute() → getCategoryNames() → getCategory($id) for each id that is not already in vmrouterHelper::$CategoryName. On cache miss that is a full category table load (+ media) per category — hundreds of extra loads on a shop this size.

The helper already has slug and category_parent_id from one getChildCategoryListObject() call.

What worked for us: after loading all categories, we built the parent/child slug paths in memory and prefilled vmrouterHelper::$CategoryName[$lang][$id]. After that, first load was fast. We also attached the prebuilt /menu-alias/parent/child URL on the category objects, but the $CategoryName warmup was the important part.