Hi,
It is how it is with variants. A variant is like a product. So, if you have 800 variants for a product, the system has to load all 800 variants on the page. So it is similar to displaying a listing of 800 products on the frontend. It would also be as slow.
Now, there are very few cases where you really need that many variants.
In most cases, you can do the same with custom fields of the table "item":
www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/4...shop-field-form.html
These won't require much loading so you can have dozens of fields with dozens of values for each without any speed difference on the product page load.
So, I would recommend looking into the possibility of using custom item fields instead of characteristics.