title: What is the best method to remedy Magento being slow with 20,000+ products
body: <p>I'm running magento on 3 Amazon EC2 instances. One is set up to be accessed directly for the admin panel, the other two are sitting behind a load balancer.</p>
  
  <p>Things were running smoothly until we imported our data with 20k+ products, each a configurable product with ~4 simple products (for different sizes, colours etc.)</p>
  
  <p>The only things running slow seem to be things that loop over products - both admin and frontend catalog pages take 5-10+ seconds to get a response from the server. Static/CMS pages load fine.</p>
  
  <p>They're all connected to the one RDS MySQL database which is running fine - I can do queries and get them back quickly.</p>
  
  <p>We have all caching (including full page cache) enabled and have enabled flat catalogs with no real change in speed.</p>
  
  <p>The magento directories are independent per-server, except for the <code>media/</code> dir which is kept in sync with <code>lsyncd</code>. The admin server behaves as the master and the two load-balanced frontend servers are the slaves.</p>