Excessive CPU Usage

[AlexT]

I have a small zen-cart shop with around 200 products. My shared hosting provider has recently sent me a email saying that my account CPU utilisation has reached an excessive level and that it will be suspended unless we upgrade. The upgrade option is VPS. I can not believe this! Admittedly, we use USEO and usercurrency add-ons that can be CPU intensive, but it is hard to imagine that this would go beyond shared hosting. I am looking for an advice whether my shop really needs VPS or it is small enough for shared hosting.

Many thanks,
Alex

[Merlinpa1969]

should be fine for shared hosting as long as its a good box and setup correctly

[AlexT]

I have just checked: the of Number of Queries is often around 650. Is this excessive for shared hosting?

Thanks,
Alex

[Merlinpa1969]

not really
we have several accounts that run over 2000 queries per page

[Website Rob]

I know from experience that USEO is not CPU intensive but never used the "usercurrency" add-on so not sure.

Also, for example, if you are using a Hoster charging less than 30 cents per GB of Data transfer for your Hosting package, they could be lowering many of your Service levels in order to offer them at that price. And their servers are usually overloaded as well.

Both of these are common tactics used by Hosters competing on price.

[AlexT]

Thank you, Merinpa1969, your replies are much appreciated!

[AlexT]

I know from experience that USEO is not CPU intensive but never used the "usercurrency" add-on so not sure.

Also, for example, if you are using a Hoster charging less than 30 cents per GB of Data transfer for your Hosting package, they could be lowering many of your Service levels in order to offer them at that price. Servers are usually overloaded as well.

Both of these are common tactics used by Hosters competing on price.

Well, this is far from the cheapest hosting and also is considered one of the better ones, this is why I am wondering.

[skipwater]

If you have ssh access run top at the command line this will show where all the cpu over head is coming from.

[AlexT]

If you have ssh access run top at the command line this will show where all the cpu over head is coming from.

This really pushes my boundaries. Even if I had the ssh access, I would not know how to use it. Can this be done through cpanel?

Thanks,
Alex

[DrByte]

If you're running a store with only 200 products, and you're only hitting 650 queries per page, and your hosting company is saying that's consuming too much CPU and/or using too many database queries, then your hosting is clearly not geared towards ecommerce.

Granted, such a statement assumes that you've not got a lot of *other* things added to your site other than what comes out-of-the-box with a clean uncustomized Zen Cart install. Maybe you've got something *else* running that's pushing it through the roof.

Either way, if you look at the list of Certified Hosts (link at top of the page), you'll see services and pricing where a site with "200 products and 650 queries per page" will not be a problem at all.



Now, before someone goes challenging the "650 queries per page" issue, note that the v2 edition of Zen Cart uses WAY LESS queries per page. But that's not going to fix the problem with your poorly-configured/tuned server limitations imposed by your hosting company.