Loading speed with variations (resolved)

Categories and product listings pages load with speed as you would expect.

When loading a page with a large number of variations, (3 colour and 7 sizes) the product page takes over 5 seconds to load, and this is running local (i am using MAMP for development).

Caching and ZIP are both one, and as I have said the rest of the site, including the pages from Hikashop that are not the product page load with speed.

It can not be image creation (e.g. creating thumbnails) as they have already been done on the first visit to the page.

I am baffled about the speed and rather worried about it's implications.

Any advice or feedback would be appreciated.

Hmmm. I did a bit more testing switching things on and off and it seems to slow right down with "Display vote in products page" turned on. Turn off and the page loads in 3 seconds, which even though is slower than I would like, considerably better.

Some more information from my testing:

The bottleneck is in the file administrator->components->com_hikashop->classes->product.php

and the part of the code causing the slow load is:

			if(isset($element->$field) && is_array($element->$field) && count($element->$field)){
				$array=array();
				foreach($element->$field as $k => $v){
					$array[$k] = (PHP_VERSION < 5) ? $v : clone($v);
				}
				$variant->$field=$array;
			}else{

				if($field=='product_name'){
					$config =& hikashop_config();
					if(!empty($variant->characteristics)){
						$separator = $config->get('characteristics_values_separator',' ');
						foreach($variant->characteristics as $val){
							$variant->characteristics_text.=$separator.$val->characteristic_value;
						}
					}
				}else{
					$variant->$field = @$element->$field;
				}
			}

Thanks for the reply Nicolas. Clear answer.

I'll have to wait and judge it on a project basis on :
1) if variants have different values
2) the size of the data

Sorry Nicolas but I can not see what I need to change in the file administrator->components->com_hikashop->classes->product.php to disable the variant description loads but still have the main product description to show. If I comment out $variant->$field = @$element->$field;, not description appears.

Seems the issue was being magnified by the same issue as in my thread "Comments and Vote unusable due to speed"

i.e. jQueryEasy.

Have to find an uneasy way to manage jQuery libraries