How to keep site running fast?

Hello there.

Im about ready to launch your new version live. Im currently running the previous release.

Im wondering how to keep the site running at its best. It seems that it slows down about a month or so after installed.

Maybe im not doing something right, but i have a cart with 4000+ products, and about 1000 users. Im currently using the file cache method, and im storing the sessions in the DB. Now im not sure if im correct, but it seems that if i didnt store the sessions, it may run faster. Or maybe i need to clean out our log more than once a month.. im not sure...


is there anything else i could do to get the site running faster?

Im currently on a root server with 1and1. i believe its the mid-level server.

The problem is your hosting. An overloaded server that get rebooted occasionally is not the best way to run a business.

overloaded?

well i was told this server would be suffecent.

No one else is on the box but us...

I dont think it should be overloaded

mysql can get overloaded,
you may want to optomize for e-commerce,
also a quick restart of the sql server and ONLY the sql server is a good thing

right now, i have my live site, running on its own db, as well as our testing site, both running on there own db.

other than that, there is nothing.

Should that be slowing down this 2.6gig server, with 1gig ram?

trust me,
Optomize to put more memory to mysql and in your server CP restart the sql server

I can have a site with 700,000+ run very fast ... compared to many sites I have seen with 1000 or less products ...

It is all up to the server hardware and configuration settings ...

The most monsterous server with the wrong configuration settings on MySQL and poor utilization of memory will run like a dog ... as Merlin pointed out ...

it's great that you have a speedy dedicated server with lots of RAM ... just allocate most of the RAM to MySQL, and you'll find that things run very fast

What improvements to MYSQL do you recommend?

Which install / configuration edits should I make?


Thanks!

Ekhm, guys... You're telling wickedklown that the server is slow, he has not enough ram etc. WITHOUT even checking his website. It's not serious... I read few threads about similar issues and this kind of response is standard, unfortunately. Maybe it's some stupid thing like lack of index on some table that makes his site slow? Throwing more ram to server won't help here.

4000 is not so many products. One of websites I helped to build had about 680,00 products and page parse times below 1 sec. And yes, it was Zen Cart ;). Without any mods like 'Simple Cache' etc. It was running on 1,6 ghz with 2gb of ram and 2 sata (not scsi ) hdds in raid 0.

wickedklown:
2.6 ghz and 1gb of ram is not a performance demon, but it should do. I would only suggest switching from 1 core cpu to 2 core or 4 core, even if it has less Mhz ( or Ghz ). When it comes to web server, 2 core 1,8 ghz cpu will be much faster then 1 core 3,6 ghz cpu (in general, conditions apply etc. :cool:)

But it won't probably solve Your problem anyway. You'll get 300 new users, add 500 new products and bang!, Your site is slow again ( 2 times more ram does _not_ mean You can have robust site with two times more products, customers etc _without_ any other optimization. You probably can have much, much less.)

There are many things that can slow down Your store. For start, check page parse times and query times. It'll give You an idea if Your mysql server is performing poorly, or maybe web server is not working as it should.

Contact me via PM and I'll try to help You somehow on weekend.