Admin Section performance problems...

[tfbiii]

I have ZC installed for a few months now and have not modified my configuration at all since completing the set up and product load.

I have been a bit hands-off (not adding anything new - just processing orders) for a few months leading up to this holiday season due to some family issues and lately discovered a troubling performance issue.

I have been working with my hosting company to try to narrow things down before I blame ZC, but as you can see, here I am looking for help with my ZC install...

Site name: www.sofiesbest.com

Main site loads fine under load and I even had 180 unique visits yesterday (that's a lot for my site)

Admin site has been renamed and I will PM it to ZC support along with an admin account if needed.

When I try to access the admin page (even just the log in) - it bring my site to a screeching halt.

I have a dedicated server - dual 1ghz CPU with 1gb RAM. I use this server for a non-ZC site as well that runs a PHP image gallery (gallery.menalto.com). This site is always available during the ZC "freeze" - so my apache always works.

Proof that apache is still up during a freeze has been facilitate by my hosting company as follows:

www.sofiesbest.com/test.html - test page shows apache is running
www.sofiesbest.com/test.php - shows system time to show php running
www.sofiesbest.com/mysqltest.php - shows system time and reads a ZC table and outputs to screen to show mySQL running

My site has less than 200 items. I've been searching the forums for tips for the last two weeks. I've done most of the speed tweaks I could find and have had no real improvement.

Here are some parse times that I have been tracking over the last few days:

7sec - admin login scree
9sec - admin home
9.2sec - Google Analytics settings
9.2sec - add conversion tracking #
166.4sec - config - product listing

The next happened when I tried to load the pages at the same time:
331sec - Admin Login
330/350/3.6 - home page

9.4sec - admin home after above finally loaded.

Today before typing this - trying to load both at same time:
196.743 - admin login
277.704/349/0.378

9.995 - admin home after finally loading

:::sigh:::

[Kim]

Have you cleaned out the Admin Access logs and email logs and run a database repair ? Back up first!

[tfbiii]

I cleared out the Admin Access logs and I did analyze and repair on the entire DB.

Where do I take care of e-mail? Another table?

[MomOfTwins]

I too am having a problem when access the Admin section. How do you..

"... cleaned out the Admin Access logs and email logs and run a database repair ? Back up first! "

I set this up a while go made changes add products and let it sit.. never did anything with it until I wanted to change the weights of products and I wanted to add more... not when I try to make these changes I can go in there for a few minutes and it locks up.. somtimes give me "IE cannot display webpage" then no one is able to access the page.

I have taken pictures of new items and will try to continue adding them into the database hopefully it's cleared up.. but how do you clean out the admin access log and run a database repair? I was told by hosting company, GoDaddy, to optimize the database.. but I have no clue how to do that... and they said they don't provide support for that..

help..
thanks,
carol
MomOfTwins

oh the site is www.maplecreekracing.com/store

[tfbiii]

I think I may have tracked this down and solved it...

While looking at other performance issue posts, I noticed some references to DB Caching. This was about the only thing I had not looked into and when I tried to access my /cache folder via FTP - I noticed a familiar lag in waiting for the directory to list.

I switched the cache type from FILE to DATABASE and saw an immediate speed increase along the lines of "Holy Crap! That's fast!"

That lasted about 5 minutes... and I started to get some errors that happened to match stuff from this post where I got the idea to change the DB Cache settings in the first place.

I changed the setting to NONE and was able to access the admin and run the sql patch from the above post and then able to switch back to DATABASE. I verified everything worked in admin (it is INSANE how fast it is now) and I changed the setting back to FILE. Sure enough, I get my slow load/lock up.

Problem solved and cause verified.

NOTE: I made the changes to BOTH configure.php files since they both had the original FILE setting for the SQL_CACHE_METHOD entries.

Now... the cache dir is so large I can't even browse it today from my FTP client. Is there no provision for purging old cache items? What good is a file-based cache that eventually becomes so bloated that it defeats it's own purpose and actually SLOWS the site?

Will my DB Cache table become this bloated as well?

[yellow1912]

It is more than likely that you have enabled the debug somewhere along the road, this debug utility will keep writing files into the cache folder if you dont disable it, hence it makes your cache folder huge over the time.