504 gateway time-out error when saving a category with 1k+ products

This article suggests a solution for the timeout issue you might have, when performing operations with large categories (1k+ plus products).

Affected products and versions:

• Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure 2.3.3
• Adobe Commerce on-premises 2.3.3
• Magento Open Source 2.3.3

Issue

Prerequisites: The Stores > Configuration > CATALOG > Catalog > Use Categories Path for Product URLs option is set to Yes for your store view.

Steps to reproduce

1. In the Commerce Admin, go to Catalog > Categories.
2. Open a large category, like more than 1000 assigned products.
3. Add a product to the category.
4. Click Save Category.

Expected result:

Category is saved successfully.

Actual result:

After five minutes of saving process, the 504 gateway timeout error page appears.

Cause

The process takes longer than the server's configured timeout.

Solution

Disabling the Generate "category/product" URL Rewrites option will remove all category/product URL rewrites from the database, and significantly decrease the time required for the operations with big categories.

To disable the Generate "category/product" URL Rewrites option:

1. In the Commerce Admin, navigate to Stores > Configuration > CATALOG > Catalog.
2. In the top left corner of the configuration page, in the Scope field, set your configuration scope to Default Config.
3. Set Generate "category/product" URL Rewrites to No.
4. Click Save Config.
5. Clean cache by running bash bin/magento cache:clean or in the Commerce Admin under System > Tools > Cache Management.

Now you can proceed to adding products to categories, or moving categories with a large number of products, and these operations will take much less time and should not cause timeout.

Related reading

Automatic Product Redirects in our user guide.