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