Performance penalty for multiple categories?

[EvanGR]

Hello,

For a shop with tens of thousands of products...

Each product being assigned to multiple categories...

Is there a performance penalty?

Thanks

[Milbo]

as far as I know it makes no difference.

[EvanGR]

Thanks...

For the sake of optimizing user experience, we find it convenient to place a product under multiple categories. So the visitor can find relevant products in multiple endpoints.
However, the e-shop currently has 20k products, and is projected to quadruple this in the coming months.
So the number of possible links will skyrocket, hence my concern.

We use a VM automatic sitemap generator. We discovered (thankfully early) that the plugin places all the possible product links in the output. This would be a problem with our strategy as the XML would quickly become too big and too slow to generate.
We tweaked the code ourselves to only generate the canonical links for products.

Any other gotchas we should be cautious about?

Thanks