slow load and missing items

[PGO2010]

In the last couple of days I've noticed my site loading very slowly and ocassionaly not loading at all. I contacted my service provider and after running several tests they found no known issues with the servers.

This morning after checking, the site seemed fine then all of a sudden over the last couple of hours it has gotten very slow again and now not loading at all. When it does load it only seems to load the header and banners but not any of the content (body).

Any help here would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

[stevesh]

We'll need a link to the site.

[PGO2010]

w w w . p h o t o g l o b e o n l i n e . c o m

[stevesh]

Loads fairly quickly here, especially considering the too-big file size of your images.

Anytime I hear that 'my site loads slowly sometimes' I think hosting issues, despite what they say.

Who's your host ?

[PGO2010]

Thanks for having a look. It seems to be running fine now here too.

The site is hosted by go daddy. I contacted them again about an hour ago and got the same answer. Everything is fine... No problems reported... But he did agree that it was running slow when he checked as well so he claimes "it must be an internal zen cart problem".

The problem is that I haven't changed any settings or anything on the site in the last few days. Is it possible for something to have changed internally without me making the change? Security issue?

Sorry if that's a silly suggestion I'm still fairly new to this stuff so just throwing out ideas to try to get to the bottom of this.

Also, you mentioned the images are too large. I have compressed them quite a bit already. What do you think a better size would be to help load a bit quicker?

Thanks!

[kobra]

Also, you mentioned the images are too large. I have compressed them quite a bit already. What do you think a better size would be to help load a bit quicker?

Checked a few and they average 40KB for an approx 1x1 image

All browsers render at 72dpi
So 72X72 = approx 6KB and any more is wasting bandwidth & time downloading

[stevesh]

I'm sure it's your host. The heavily-advertised hosts fill their servers to overflowing, slowing down every site on the server, especially those which use dynamic software like Zencart. If you persist, they may move you to a less-crowded server, but it will happen again as that one fills up.

The Image Handler 2 mod can help you optimize your images.

[PGO2010]

Thanks for the advise.

I just noticed something this morning while look at the files on the FTP. All the dates on the folders for the site seem to have a modified date of April 3rd at 7:40am. This is about the time that the site started getting really bad. The files all seem unchanged, it's only the dates on the folders and I know for a fact I have not changed anything. What could this mean? Is this normal?

At this point most of the time when I go to the site. If it does load then it often only loads the banner and sidebars bit doesn't display any of the products on the main page.

I also just called go daddy again and they said they would switch me over to their 4Gh server and switch the platform to Linux from windows. They suggested that zen cart would run better on linux. What doesn't make sense to me is that it was running fine as is before April 3rd.

Any thoughts on the date change on all the folders? Is that due to go daddy moving files around on their servers or something else? Security issue?

Thanks again!

[Ajeh]

Depending on how your site was moved could account for the date changes ... you might ask them to be sure ...

As to the "sudden" speed change ... think of it this way ... before it slowed down, Fred and Bob were on your server ... no problem ... then Harry and Ted were added to you server and they added such a load on the server it affected your site ...

Overloaded servers or a single site that is really setup wrong or putting heavy loads on the server can affect all other sites on that server ...

You will find with site that are not e-commerce oriented, you will have this issue occur again and again depending on who gets added to the server and how it is managed ...

[PGO2010]

Got it!

Would the slow server also explain why even when it does load it still sometimes only loads banners and headers but no products? Or would this be a site issue?

I think at this point I will be leaving go daddy in the near future. Just trying to figure out who to go with. Blue host was looking very good but looking at some of their more recent reviews (2011) it seems like the have been going down hill a bit by over selling their servers as well.

Any other suggestions? Or is blue host the way to go for zen cart?