The Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) model is both Magento's greatest strength and its most persistent performance bottleneck. It gives you unlimited flexibility to add product attributes without schema changes, but that flexibility comes at a cost — every product load can spawn dozens of JOIN operations across multiple tables. If your category pages load slowly, your product detail pages feel sluggish, or your admin product grid takes forever to filter, EAV is almost certainly a contributing factor