Possible bug/problem - site down

[helenthemum]

Hi

My zencart is the old old version 1.3 haven't upgraded for various reasons (main one being adjusted some of zen cart it would take along time to upgrade or so I have been told).

We have our site hosted by streamline.net.

We have has server problems on and off since August, been told by streamline.net that they will track and trace the problem.

No our site is totally unusable by our customers as it keeps going slow then crashing altogether.

After several phone calls to streamline.net they admit there is a problem, but cannot trace it.

I sell fancy dress and this is usually the month I make 15% of my turnover. Because of these on going problems and unusable site (not the credit crunch) I will take less than 8%.

Is there any way I could check to see whether or not I have done something to break my own site (even though I am sure I have done nothing other than add new products).

Yours really hopefully before all is lost.

Helen

[kuroi]

What version of Zen Cart are you using?
What are the customisations that prevent you from upgrading (might give clues as to what is slowing your system down)?
What version of PHP is your server running? Has this changed recently?
What version of MySQL is your server running? Has this changed recently?
What pages or site visitor actions cause your site to run slowly?
What is your site's URL?

[helenthemum]

I'm not the techni so will try and answer your questions as fully as I can.

versions 1.3

We sell custom made tutu skirts with loads of colour choices so the pages had to be changed to allow people to choose different colours from a colour chart. He also had to make the fields compulsory.

Server is mysql 11. The hosting company tried to restart the serve without any sucess, as far as I am aware nothing else has changed regarding the server, but then again they may not be telling us the full truth.

Have no idea. I seems to be totally random as to when the site goes down or runs slow. We are experiencing very heavy traffic at the moment with sometimes 100 people on line because of Halloween, so thsi could be causing it, but I don't see how.

www.thetutushop.co.uk

Any help or advice which may or may not help would be truly greatful.

Helen

[kuroi]

Tried to connect to your store but got an internal server error. This doesn't look like a problem with your Zen Cart, and the sort of change that you described wouldn't hurt the home page anyway.

This is almost certainly a problem with your server or how it has been configured. Either way, the people best qualified by a long way to deal with it is your webhost as they are the only ones with access to all the configuration and log information.

If they can't sort it out, I'd advise changing webhost.

[helenthemum]

Ok Just spoken with the more tecki person hopefully some of this info will help.

Version 1.2.7 d

He modified the products with attibutes code to accomodate the custom made skirts we sell. If the attibute has mroe than 1000 items in stock it ignores the attibute.

Mods added Royalmail - second class, 1st class and special delivery all slightly modified why i don't know.

3rd party protx mod added

Products with attributes mod

Also some php code modified sometime ago which shouldn't have affected anything as done a while ago.

Helen

[fairestcape]

It could be that the host has upgraded some aspect of the server software that 1.2.7 does not like.

One reason why upgrading ZC is important is to try to stay in tune with what hosts are likely to do when newer versions of operating software are released...

... another reason is to take advantage of newer features in ZC...

...and the third reason is to try to keep the site as secure as possible.

[helenthemum]

So if the techni (more commonly known as hubby) upgrade to the 1.3.8 version do you think the site would work (even with the possibility of the bits he has modified not working).

Something is better than nothing. He also has this week off work to work on the site if necessary.

Thank you so much for your time.

Helen

[helenthemum]

Hubby did try to upgrade to 1.3.8. There were 8 scripts that had to run, 6 went fine the 7th just wouldn't work and after using up his week of work he gave up.

Helen

[kuroi]

Version 1.2.7 is some three years old. But technologies have moved on and the versions of both PHP and MySQL that were used when 1.2.7 was released have now been retired, and it is known to be incompatible with the versions of PHP and MySQL that webhosts normally run nowadays.

I'm afraid that it is unlikely that you will be able to resolve this without upgrading.

[helenthemum]

The only thing that is odd is that we have been having this problem intermittently for 3 or 4 months...

The site would be veeerry slow to deliver pages, or else we would get internal server errors 500.

By the time we raised a ticket and it was looked at the problem had disappeared.

So again we saw this issue this week, and raised a ticket. but its been only very bad since thursday morning.

My point is if this was a PHP or mySQL upgrade how come we had this problem for a while and it was so sporadic?