Generating Large PDF Catalogs

If you have many products like above 500 or many products in multiple categories, the full catalog may stop rendering and gives you a 500 / 504 error. However the category catalog still works (of course dependent on the amount of products inside a category).

So if you want to create the full catalog with many products, you need full server access and your server should have a good configuration. Do not try it on a 512mb RAM cloud server. But before optimizing your server you can try changing our plugin configuration.

Plugin Configuration:

1. Disable Variations (looping through all variations is a huge task)
2. Disable QR Codes (Generation & Rendering takes time)
3. Disable product Gallery Images OR set a smaller Gallery image size type (e.g. thumbnail)
4. Set small Product Images & Category Image Size Types (e.g. shop_catalog image size)
5. Turn of Performance Options
   1. Use Images Locally
   2. Enable Caching
   3. plus the rest
6. Decrease Cover Image sizes

Server Optimization:

1. Switch to PHP7 if you haven’t yet
2. Increase memory_limit in php.ini
   (if you see errors like Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 54 bytes)
3. Increase max_execution_time in php.ini
   (if you see errors like PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in ..)
4. Increase fastcgi_read_timeout in nginx / apache
   (if you get a 504 error)
5. Look into your error logs …

Example:

nginx:
fastcgi_read_timeout 600

php:
max_execution_time 600
memory_limit 512MB

With this config we were able to create a catalog with more than 500 pages. 370 products assigned to multiple categories.