This topic discusses dimension search and its impact on MDEX Engine performance.

Creating the additional index structures for compound dimension search may result in a moderate increase in indexing time, particularly if there are a large number of dimensions.

The runtime performance of dimension search directly corresponds to the number of dimension values and the size of the resulting set of matching dimension values. But in general, this feature performs at a much higher number of operations per second than navigation requests.

The most common performance problem is when the resulting set of dimension values is exceptionally large (greater than 1,000), thus creating a large results page. This is when the advanced dimension search parameters should be used to limit the number of results per request.

Compound dimension search requests are generally more expensive than non-compound requests, and are comparable in performance to record search requests:

In both cases, the query will be faster if you limit the results by using any of the advanced dimension search parameters. For example, you can use the Di parameter to specify the specific dimension (in the case of the default dimension search), or a list of dimension value IDs (in the case of compound dimension search) for which you expect matches returned by the MDEX Engine.