Anyone here had experience with using over 40 facets on SCA? We have a client who has 92 facets they would like to use (most are unique to a certain product category instead of impacting all products and categories), and I'm interested to hear other's experience on the performance impacts of such a large number of facets as the documentation recommends not using over 40 facets.

Yes. Don’t do it. You should half that amount. Collate them. Or add some as discriptive or searchable information. If you use that many it slows everything down, a lot.

We don't have a hard limit but Gordon's probably right. Once you get to 40, you'll probably notice a significant reduction in performance. I would also add that having that many facets will probably not provide a meaningful search experience to customers either. Imagine as a shopper yourself, performing a search, and then seeing 40 different facets, each with 5-10 facet values. You wouldn't know what to do

You would also face problems getting all the facets from the Item API in the front-end (PLP facets). I can also confirm that the performance is poor with facets greater than the recommended number

We're using 61 facets right now, and I'm not sure if there is a performance hit the way we are using them (like you: unique to certain categories) Also, we do not use the All Products 'Shop' link on our navigation. See https://www.jobrien.com Let me know if you think there is a significant performance hit.

Wes makes a good point. If you can limit the exposure of the facets so that they don't all load at once (eg by minimising your product range at every point) then it may not be problematic

Thanks all for the feedback! I think we're in a similar boat to you Wes - we'll be using half a dozen to a dozen per category, rather than all facets in a single category. Even when I navigated to https://www.jobrien.com/search it didn't seem noticeably slow even though it was pulling all your products and facets.

@Harley I would advise you track the actual usage of the facets using Google Analytics. On our old pre-denali SCA website we had far too many facets. Using Google Analytics we determined that the vast majority were simply not used and this was used to get buy-in from management that their desire for infinite facets were useless and detrimental to performance. As such we now only have a handful of facets

Thanks for the idea - its a new site, so no data from GA at this point. But I'll keep it in mind for future 🙂

Performance problem it´s no just about the number of facets but actually the number of options within each facet. As an example, a product list page showing 30 facets whith 40 options for each of them will perform worst than a product list page with 50 facets and 5 options within each of them.

Thanks for that clarification @Flo Meilan. Are there any options available to purchase a higher tier of processing/performance for facets on SCA if there are speed impacts? Like can be done for NetSuite when dealing with script performance and purchasing a higher tier.

Hi @Harley. There is not something specific for that use case. Upgrading Tier can help you if you need to support more users, need more file cabinet storage or need more capacity for more monthly transactions, but it won´t help you if you need faster page loads. Your Account Manager should be able to help you to understand where Tier upgrades can help.

Ok, good to know for future reference.