Product Collection Takes too much time

Question

I have the following code.

        $collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection();
        $collection->addAttributeToSelect(array('featuredcategory','featured', 'price','name','small_image','frontend_name'));
        $collection->addFieldToFilter('type_id', 'configurable');

This takes about 5 secs. But when I comment the last line i.e.

//$collection->addFieldToFilter('type_id', 'configurable');

it takes less than 1.5 secs.

I have flat catalog enabled.

Question: Is there anything wrong with this collection?

I use Magento 1.6

Answer 1

Question: Is there anything wrong with this collection?

No.

If flat is enabled

I'm not sure, how magento checks which columns are generated into the flat table. Maybe the type_id is not and has to be joint into the flat table? Please check the query by $collection->load(true) what magento is doing.

If flat is not enabled

This doesn't make sense to me. The column type_id is a static attribute, means it is part of the base table catalog_product_entity. It should be very fast to filter by this column, compared to other attributes.

The problem is, that the column has no index on it, so MySQL has to do a full table scan, but if you have no other filters on it, magento will get all products, so it does a full table scan either. What you can try is to add an index on the column if you need this query often or it is customer relevant.