Performance Issues on site with many products

[totalsam]

Hi,

Currently running a store with 1.3.9h (planning to upgrade soon just haven't had a free moment yet!) with 50k products and 5,600 categories. I'm about to launch another 8k products and later an additional 35k products and probably an additional 3k categories will be needed for these products. This will bring totals to about 95k products and 9k categories. The site is already slow, admin runs as smooth as a babies bottom but customer side is not so slick.

The product search used to be very slow, but changing the default search to not search product descriptions sped this up dramatically (still not exactly brisk though!). Browsing by categories and loading product pages however is incredibly tediously slow.

The website address is www. e m i n e n c e g i f t s dotcodotuk (sorry don't want search engines to spot it on here!).

I currently am on a premium shared hosting plan from Camelot, is it an optimisation issue or should I really be looking towards going dedicated?

All comments would be much appreciated!

[dgent]

Doesnt seem very slow to me, each page loads within 2 seconds. You should use an image handler though, so all the thumbnails are actually thumbnails and not the full image.

[totalsam]

The home page loads brilliantly, but try clicking on photo gifts and see how long that takes to load. I've read the email, opened the forum and replied to this message and its still not opened the page.

[totalsam]

I'll look into the image handler when I have an opportunity, but I don't believe this is the problem, chrome loads text first then images, so in theory I should see the text and then a delay before the images catch up.

[dgent]

I did. It must be a server issue, because when I replied, I went through lots of categories, and products, and even went to the all_products page and everything loaded in about 1-2 seconds.

Now it won't even open most pages, and even if you do a view source of a page, it won't even load - and thats not loading any external files..

[totalsam]

After a quick look the "All products" is pretty quick, its just the loading of individual pages which is now taking into the minutes to load instead of seconds.

[dgent]

Yes, but last time I went into individual products and it was fine.

[nigelt74]

Ok nothing obvious, everything seems fairly quick to me, perhaps if some one could give a link to a slow page that may help

1) Optimise your images, that may be part of it, image scaler might be a better option for you than image handler
when I load one of your pages this is the image that is used for the thumbnail /yoursite/images/jewellery/WC009.jpg its 550px x 624px which is downloaded then resized by the browser to 90 by 70px.
2) get rid of stuff you aren't using, are you using css buttons? if not get rid of the stylesheet

Actually Have you run your site through a few of the testing sites out there

http://gtmetrix.com

this gives you both googles page speed and Yahoos ySlow

[totalsam]

Here's a couple of examples

Not too bad now it doesn't search product descriptions by default, but a search:

https://www. e m i n e n c e g i f t s dot co dot uk/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=0&keyword=hello

The real killer - just opening a top level category - photo gifts:

http://www. e m i n e n c e g i f t s dot co dot uk/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=34

[DrByte]

Have you considered this advice? https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=21

And what are your page/query parse times like? https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/i...hp?article=105