Hi,
Suppose that you have 3 characteristics with 5 values for each one attached to your product. It means that you have 5*5*5 variants for that product. Above a few hundred variants, your server won't be able to display some pages properly.
Now, you could have only 1 characteristic with 100 values and it would be fine.
On the other hand, you could have 6 characteristics with 2 values and it would be fine too.
If you need to have lots of dropdowns with lots of values for your products, you should use options or custom fields of the table "item" instead (at least for some of them):
www.hikashop.com/en/support/documentatio...ct-form.html#options
www.hikashop.com/en/support/documentatio...p-field-listing.html