Product Variant FAIL

-- HikaShop version -- : 2.6.0
-- Joomla version -- : 3.4.5
-- PHP version -- : 5.5.0
-- Error-message(debug-mod must be tuned on) -- : Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /components/com_hikashop/views/product/view.html.php on line 1800

So as suggested, I read other forum posts. I'm having a big issue with the Variant section for products that is literally causing my product to break and be inaccessible. I have a product that has four different characteristic/options. Each of those have a number of dropdown options which will affect the price.

The problem: when I go into the Variants tab and choose all options for each characteristic then click save, it appears to save but has a 0 next to the Variant name in the tab. Then, I can't get to my product anymore because it times out! I only have a 30 second timeout but it shouldn't take more than that to get a product with multiple options. The problem is how this variant system works. Can you please suggest a solution to fixing this? I would think for a shopping cart system, this is not an uncommon request.

Luckily I made a copy of the item because this happened before and I had to completely recreate the item.

Hello,
Did you use characteristics with a lot of values ? The issue is maybe coming from the fact that your website isn't "fast" enough to load each combination of product variant.

I have four different characteristics. Each has 3 or more options. Obviously, that creates a lot of variants. I find the variant system pretty archaic. Creating multiple database entries is really unnecessary for this type of common shopping cart feature. To say my website isn't fast enough is funny. Yes, I have a 30 second timeout. However, a page taking longer than 30 seconds to load presents a major user experience issue. When you bloat a database with hundreds of entries, all of these entries in the query are called when viewing the product. That means the request is going to take a long time.

Why aren't you guys using some sort of JS/Jquery function that takes the value of a characteristic if there is a price change, add it to the price, then store that in a cookie when the person clicks add to cart? There are many other far more efficient means for handling something like product options.

I find it weird that the demo for the laptop on your site isn't working. Laptops and computers are perfect examples of shopping cart items that would have a LOT of different options to choose from. This would create 1000s of variants. Variants just are not good for these types of products. They are ok for items with few options. Not to mention going in and having to manually add pricing to all of these variants is insane!

Hi,

The variants are indeed no adapted to have a lot of variants for one product.
But for some variants, it is perfect. The variants don't handle only the price, there is a lot of other informations that can be personalized per variants, the name, code, quantity, images, files, custom fields...

In your case, if only the price change from one variant to another one, yes it is indeed not adapted.
It would be better to use, for example, a category for the main product name, and then products for each variants.
Then to populate the price, you can potentially use the mass actions. Else a custom plugin based on custom fields could be the best option.