[wp-hackers] wp-e-commerce problem

[b_frank]

Hello, I'm new to wordpress. Trying to help out a friend who paid a web
developer to build a site using wordpress and a few plugins including
wp-e-commerce. Apparently he got in over his head and abandoned the project
while claiming he had done what was asked. That's not so much relevant to my
question except to say I'm trying to reverse engineer what was done and I'd
love to confirm what I think I'm seeing. The site is extremely slow and many
parts just seem to timeout or crash the server so that I have to reboot.

The site owner needs a great deal of variations to her products. At this
time only one product is entered to wp-e-commerce but it resulted in 4000
rows in the wp_posts table. wp_posts_meta has over 55k. When I stop using so
many variations, the site starts to function.

Can anyone help me understand why wp-e-commerce handles it this way? The way
I see it, they are forcing the product database into wp_posts and in order
to have a place to store variation inventory and variation pricing, a record
for every possible combination needs to be generated. Yet when loading the
product page, it only has to retrieve content from the original post. I
would've expected wp-e-commerce to store inventory and pricing in its own
tables and not fill wp_posts with 4000 copies of the same content.

Initially I was hoping there was just some configuration error now I'm not
so sure. 
If this really is the wp-e-commerce design do you think its feasible for me
to attempt to hook in some custom php which would avoid overload how the
plugin updates the database? I'm thinking if I stopped the admin functions
from duplicating the content in wp_posts and then added some wpsc tables to
handle the inventory and pricing. Then I'd have to add some filters to
substitute whatever variation data is needed into the final output. Does
this sound feasible? I'd appreciate any expert opinions before I head off in
a direction I may regret.

Thankyou and sorry this is such a long post.

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