Slow site before & after 1.3.7 upgrade

[inovermyhead]

Good morning, all ... badly need some advice and it's another long story ...
Recently took on trying to upgrade 2 sites from 1.2.4 to 1.3.7 (though my Cart competence level is "newbie"). The first was www.wizardswhimsy.com (about 450 products) and the upgrade went smoothly and was implemented in February (many thanks to the Zen Cart crew for a great product!), with acceptable parse time, even though the host is not Zen Cart certified. A good learning experience.

The 2d site was http://www.creektree.net (about 650 products) & it has issues on 1.2.4, being very slow (main page parse time @ 12 seconds), plus it had 3 categories which contained both subcategories & products, and each product was linked into other subcategories (a few to as many as 5). We edited those 3 categories, getting rid of the products in them, and with that effort, and not displaying the new products on the main page, got the main page parse time down to 5-6 seconds (all the product links are still in place, though).

Instead of starting from scratch to upgrade CreekTree, I copied the file system & data base used by Wizard's Whimsy to the localhost, created a template for CreekTree, and made other changes as needed. At that point, I loaded the localhost with the CreekTree 1.2.4 DB, and ran the 1.3.7 zc_install upgrade against it. So far, so good, so the file system was uploaded to a test folder, the CreekTree 1.2.4 data base was restored to an empty DB and the the 1.3.7 zc_install upgrade run. This last was all done at http://www.creektree.net/shopct137 and this part all went pretty smoothly and appears to be working as expected.

However, the parse time is still slow (main page @ 6-7 seconds) , even slower than it was on 1.2.4 by 1-2 seconds sometimes, & product listing pages are worse. I tried getting rid of about 8 of the linked subcategories in the "Hummingbird Feeders", but that didn't help. Haven't been able to find anything that seemed pertinent in any of the forums. Was hoping some of you gurus and pros could put me onto something that will cure the situation until we can arrange to get to a ZC certified host, as I think that may be part of the problem. Also was wondering if the product count is just too high?

If I can give you any other info that will help resolve this, please let me know.

Thanks in advance to you all,
inovermyhead

[inovermyhead]

Well, I tried reorganizing the categories on CreekTreeUSA, taking several of the top level categories and moving them into common categories (i.e. Hummingbird Feeders, Bird Feeders & Squirrel Feeders became subcategories under a Feeder category). This cut the top level categories from 20 down to 10. This seemed to cut down the number of queries for the main page, but the parse time didn't appear to improve, and may have gotten worse.

I guess I don't understand what's going on when the categories are referenced. Even going from the product index listing to a product has a parse time of 18 seconds and over 200 queries.

Is there a thread I missed somewhere on this topic, and maybe how linking products into multiple categories affects the database ? Even the admin is murderously slow. And this may all be due to a slow host, but I can't reconcile that to the quite acceptable times on Wizard's Whimsy.

Thanks for any leads you can provide,
inovermyhead

[misty]

Reduce size of images..quite a number on your index page, and several
over 20k...i.e.

http://www.creektree.net/shopct137/s.../cedarteak.gif

almost 50k...

[inovermyhead]

Thanks for your response, misty ... I understand that the larger image sizes will slow down the transmission, but I didn't think it would slow down the parse time. If that is so, I'll need to work on that, but as I said, even clicking on a product listing to see a single product can take 18 seconds. Would that be because of the image size ?

[Ajeh]

You appear to be on a very slow server or one that is not optimized for MySQL and php ...

Your site does not have enough to it to really warrant these slow times per page ...

I would speak to your hosting site about getting moved to a less overloaded server to see if that solves this problem ...

Otherwise, consider on of our Certified Hosting sites listed in the Hosting link at the top of your screen where they know what e-commerce, MySQL and php is all about ...

I have clients with 4000+ of Products and 67000+ attributes that run between 0.2 to 0.7 on the average and between 0.9 to 1.5 seconds per page on the worse case situations ...

Note: you also are calling images that appear to be hard coded from other sites ...

Such as you PayPal and GeoTrust images ... these throw secure errors and will confuse your customers and make them want to leave ...

[misty]

Suggest you listen to Ajeh.. just revisited your site
to check again re accessing products.. but received
message ""The connection has timed out""

[inovermyhead]

Hello, Ajeh, thanks for your reply.

You're right about those 2 images coming from another site, must have overlooked them in the changeover, and will get them changed.

So your opinion is that this slow parse time is all due to the database server configuration? That had been my initial thought, but with the wizardswhimsy.com pages having no problem, I put it out of my head. But I guess the 2 shops ARE on different database servers, even though they are in the same web space, right ?

However, I have had no luck (at all!) in getting any help or attention from the host, and I've already been looking into the Zen certified hosting. But I'll try again to get 1&1 to do something.

[Ajeh]

The hosting site you are using is notorious for slow or overloaded servers ...

Keep after them to get you moved to a less overloaded server or perhaps it is time to consider a real e-commerce hosting solution and look into our Zen Cart Certified Hosting sites from the Hosting link at the top of your screen ...

[inovermyhead]

Thanks, Ajeh, I'll be moving pretty soon I hope.

One question, though ... When you say "overloaded server" are you referring to the server for the web space or the database server, or both, or either, or are the web space and database usually on the same server ? I'm seeing that most of the parse time is account for by the query time, so was wondering about that.

inovermyhead

[Ajeh]

A server is a physical computer that hosts 1 to many web sites ...

Some can host 1000s just fine and others can only host 1 ...

The difference being what the "load" is that each of the domain(s) place on the server ...

If there are 100s to 1000s of domains on a server, the load can increase until all domains run slow ...

If 1 particular domain utilizes an excessive amount of load on the server than all the others are affected ...

Usually the problem is that a server is hosting too many domains and all told, this creates an excessive load on a server ...

Most hosting sites will move domains that use an excessive amount of load to a different server so that the rest of the domains will not suffer ...

Other hosts keep on loading more and more domains until the server is overcrowded ... this overcrowding maintains a constant overloaded condition ...

If you are on a server that is overloaded then your hosting site can:

1 optimize the server better for better performance

2 move the "heavy" load domains else where

3 move you to a less overloaded server

If they will not or cannot, then you need to look into a better hosting solution ...

If you are the cause of the overload then it is up to you to obtain a hosting solution that can manage your needs ...

Most sites, unless you have 100s of categories and 1000s of products and 1000s of attributes are not "too much" for a properly configured server ...

So, the "overload" is caused by the hosting site themselves and how they are managing their servers ...

Looking at your site, you don't have enough there to make for an undo load to the server ... therefor you are most likely on an overloaded server vs the cause of an overloaded server ...