Perfomance in index.php whenn displaying alot of products

[loop]

Hi all
I want on the category_nested pages to show a product_listing of products which are nested in the category
so whenn visiting mainCat, i want to show products of subcat1 and subcat2, everything works, but in heavy structured categories i have alot of products nested (20 000 in one maincat) and the loading of the website to show the 24 Products (page1) is 3 seconds, on small pages the loadtime is <1sec

mainCat
subcat1
subcat2

so my question is, as i don't need to see / show 20'000 products and only the first 24 products, is there a way to change something that the request is faster? maybe to change the splitPageResults.php or something else to just show 24 products and ignore the rest...

the idea is, to show the first 24 products of the 20000 and he can filter it down to a amount he likes to page through...

thanks for every idea...

[Omar_one]

@loop have you checked this module (s01e02 items per page)
app.php/addons/supporters_code/s01e02_items_per_page/

[Omar_one]

and you can change the Amount of products to list in admin->configuration-> Maximum Values ->Search Results

but this will effect on every Search Results .. like amount of orders to list etc...

[loop]

Hi Omar, it's not that i want to show less products in index_nested category, i want to show 24 (as everywhere on the webpage, with pagination to browse)
the problem is, that something takes longer to show the 24 products on a result of 20'000 thann to show 24 on a result of 100 products. The question is, if there is some possibilitie / method to optimize a method to handle the 20'000 Result faster

[loop]

i found a solution. i make a special query which only catch 24 bestsellers in the nested_index...