Having a huge number of variations in a single product leads to inability to save changes

Overview of the issue

It is not advisable to have one product with a huge number (several hundred) of variations. This can lead to issues when updating a product since all of the variations need to be updated.

If you are just updating the product, the changes are applied but the process is not completed, because all variations need to be refreshed. This means that after the process fails, your product content is updated, but not the variations.

Workaround

It is recommended to split the variations between more than one product.

If you already have a huge number of variations and you have problems updating the product, you can try the following:

• Increase the max_execution_time time and memory dedicated to PHP and WordPress – http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php
• Use the debug functions in WooCommerce Multilingual, to synchronise the product variations: go to WPML->WooCommerce Multilingual and use the “Troubleshooting” link at the bottom of the page. Then, use the option to sync product variations between translations.
• Where possible, consider creating separate products instead of a single product with multiple variations

Please note that in WooCommerce Multilingual 3.8, we will revisit the logic for synchronizing the variations to allow the possibility of handling a large number of variations of the same product.