Can anyone explain what impact (if any) the size of a site's taxonomy vocabularies will have on server requirements and site performance? I just started working w/ Drupal and this is one of my concerns, but I haven't found anything covering it.
As an example, I have 3 hierarchical vocabularies: geographic w/ ~50 terms, asset type w/ ~15 terms, and topic w/ ~150 terms. I'm thinking about adding a 4th vocabulary where the terms are contributors' company names so you can identify all of the digital assets that belong to a specific contributor...this could easily exceed 1,500 companies (and therefore 1,500+ vocabulary terms) so I'm concerned about how this may affect hardware requirements to host the site w/ an acceptable level of performance.
Is this a valid concern or a non-issue? Can anyone weigh in based on their experience?
Comments
It depends
on what you do with those terms. I don't think just having that many terms and just tagging nodes with them will affect performance much at all.
But you if have more complex logic on the site processing those terms for other purposes it could slow things down. eg my taxonomy_filter module creates a custom menu block that depends on the current combination of terms you are viewing and this does involve extra processing (especially if you want node counts etc). It doesn't cause any problem with 3 vocabs and 100+ terms, but I've never tried 1500 terms.
But overall I don't think you'll notice any problem with that many terms.
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Anton
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It might be a problem
You might face performance problems with large taxonomies : see this interesting issue.
I plan to use the proposed solution (or a similar one) to deal with a taxonomy of 3000+ terms.