50 taxonomies, 5000 terms. Performance?

  • I have a project on the drawing board that would require 50 taxonomies and 5000 terms, divided between 5 custom post types.

    Specifically, each post type would have 10 taxonomies, and each taxonomy would contain identical terms (names and slugs).

    2 questions to anyone in the know…

    1. given they’d be non-hierarchical, would this knock performance in wp-admin?

    (effectively, I’d be calling 10 “tag boxes” per post – though only 1 term would ever be saved).

    2. And database performance? (50 sets of 100 terms, each identical)

    Any knowledge much appreciated.

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  • If you get your database indexes right (not that hard) the load woudl be minimal.

    However I would suggest doing it a slightly different way. If all of the taxonomies and terms will be the same, just set up one and allocate it to all of your post types. That way there’s no duplication and you’ll save several 1,000 database entries.

    Thread Starter aljuk

    (@aljuk)

    Thanks. Actually I got the description of sets and terms wrong (10 tax, each with its own set of approx 100 different terms – that arrangement then “cloned” for each cpt), but it would be the same ballpark, or less, in terms of load.

    Sharing tax between post types won’t work though I know what you’re suggesting, and I do use that on some sites (e.g. location data across post types), but in this instance each cpt’s taxonomies need to work independently.

    When you say “get your database indexes right”, can you elaborate a little on the mechanics of that? Is there anything special I should do, naming conventions etc? I’m currently defining the taxonomies as per usual in functions.php and importing the terms lists via xml.

    There’s no naming conventions because you’d be using the tables and columns from the standard WordPress tables. The only thing that you’d need to look at is creating index’s on those tables that will match the queries that are being done. It will help speed things up a bit when the tables get huge, but even with a few 1,000 entries it won’t be slow.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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