Constraint satisfaction is NP-complete and for optimization it’s NP-hard. In theory that means it’s going to be equally hard to determine how many steps solving

Constraint satisfaction is NP-complete and for optimization it’s NP-hard. In theory that means it’s going to be equally hard to determine how many steps solving the problem takes as it is to simply solve the problem. Local search is always going to outperform global search but there’s no guarantee of a solution or an optimal one. So it really depends on your needs and how long you’re prepared to wait. Modern CSP solvers can handle impressively large problems with multiple thousands of clauses (1m+ for SAT), but it really depends on what your constraints look like.