Need to Reduce CPU Usage

[philip937]

Can anyone give any advice of settings/configurations that could possible be change to reduce the CPU usage?

Settings that perhaps are not essential etc?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Phil

[RodG]

Can anyone give any advice of settings/configurations that could possible be change to reduce the CPU usage?

Settings that perhaps are not essential etc?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

Phil

Sure. /admin/configuration/Website_maintenance/Down_for_maintenance = TRUE

Works a charm every time.


Cheers
Rod

ps. You'll get far more useful replies if you give us some kind of idea what the problem is that you are experiencing, and "high CPU usage" is NOT a helpful response. For all we know you are running your store on a Commodore C64.

What version zencart?
What add-ons are you using ?
What conditions cause the high CPU usage? (admin functions, store front? Listing a category with 100,000 products).
Are you sure you problems are related to high CPU usage, and not a network problem? Are you hosted on an overloaded server, such as slowDaddy.. ..

[philip937]

Sure. /admin/configuration/Website_maintenance/Down_for_maintenance = TRUE

Works a charm every time.


Cheers
Rod

ps. You'll get far more useful replies if you give us some kind of idea what the problem is that you are experiencing, and "high CPU usage" is NOT a helpful response. For all we know you are running your store on a Commodore C64.

What version zencart?
What add-ons are you using ?
What conditions cause the high CPU usage? (admin functions, store front? Listing a category with 100,000 products).
Are you sure you problems are related to high CPU usage, and not a network problem? Are you hosted on an overloaded server, such as slowDaddy.. ..

haha very good! not sure it'll do much for sales though

im on the most current version of zen-cart. i have linux cpanel with eukhost. various addons like better together, simple ssu(should be fully cahed by now), multi cross sell, cart upsell.

never had issues until now, however I have started getting alot more traffic which I assume is what is causing it so the assumption would be store front.

the long term best fix is for me to go dedicated which i am going to be doing, however dont want to risk it as this is my busiest time, so hence trying to find ways of reducing the usage of what I currently have.

I read somewhere about changing the sql cache method? writing to file? seem someone say it sped up their site but would it help the load on CPU at all?

Cheers

[RodG]

haha very good! not sure it'll do much for sales though

Sales or performance. Pick one :)

im on the most current version of zen-cart

Forgive me for being critical here, but please, never, ever respond with "im on the most current version" (of anything).

The reason being is that not everyone keeps up to date with whatever the latest version may be.. In fact the 'latest version' of zencart is actually V1.5, but my gut feeling is telling me that you are referring to V1.3.9x Am I correct?

. i have linux cpanel with eukhost.

Sadly, I'm not familiar with this host, so I can't make a comment such as 'the problem is with the host' (which is what I would have told you if you were with sloDaddy.

Perhaps someone else familiar with this host will have a better idea if they overload their servers or not.

various addons like better together, simple ssu(should be fully cahed by now), multi cross sell, cart upsell.

None of these raise any red flags either.

never had issues until now, however I have started getting alot more traffic which I assume is what is causing it so the assumption would be store front.

Now this probably is relevant. Unless you've been doing a lot of promotion somewhere it is somewhat unusual for a store to have a significant increase in traffic over a short period of time.
It could be worth investigating your log files to see where all this extra traffic is coming from.

My first suspicion is that your store is being 'hit' by the Yandex spider. This 'evil' crawler ignores the robots.txt files, and it hits a server very hard over a somewhat extended period of time, often days. The effects can be catastrophic, and can bring a store to a complete standstill.

the long term best fix is for me to go dedicated which i am going to be doing,

Please be careful with this. It is easy to assume that a dedicated server will cure this type of problem, but unless you spring for a server with *at least* 1gig of memory you may well find your performance will actually be worse than it was with the shared server. Shared servers usually have many gig of memory, which lets them handle peak loads with relative ease.
A lack of available memory to handle such peaks can crash a dedicated server.

I read somewhere about changing the sql cache method? writing to file? seem someone say it sped up their site but would it help the load on CPU at all?

Good question. A good rule of thumb is anything that causes a server speedup will almost certainly have a followup effect of reducing the CPU load. However, what needs to be taken into consideration is exactly how and where are the gains made (or lost).

Example: If your slowdowns are caused by an overloaded SQL server, then using file storage for the cache files will reduce the load somewhat, which will in turn improve overall performance.
On the other hand, if the slowdowns are being caused by a crawler hammering your site and you are using a file based cache, you will probably get better performance by switching to the SQL cache.

Having said that, I am not an expert with the way zencart uses the cache files, in fact I honestly don't even know what the zen-cart team even recommend is the best to use, so although my comments above are sound in theory, in practice it could be a whole different story. Either way, changing from one to the other has improved things for some people, so in the absence of more informed advice, I'd say try changing and see what effect it has for your store.

Anyway, I know I probably still given you any answers you need for your specific question, but hopefully I've been a little more helpful this time around, and have given you a few other things to think about other than just trying to reduce the CPU usage.

Cheers
Rod

[philip937]

Thanks Rod, I appreciate the in depth reply and you make good points.

I have checked traffic and yes it is through promotion as my product is very seasonal and we are at peak as well as the promotional stuff going on.

Pretty sure its not Yandex, however I do get ##########spider ALOT, however again, always have any is only a problem with the increase in traffic.

Interesting point about dedicated server? my shared server has 10G RAm, however user account on the server is limited by I assume a percentage of this, so when I hit 100/100% that is of my allowance not of the servers full capability (thats my understanding anyway.

I have been recommended a dedicated server with minimum of 2G RAM with the ability to expand up to 8G if required, sounds sensible to me?

anyways, unless DrByte or any of the zen gurus reply and say no to the sql cache to file, I might just give it a stab.

Also isnt there a setting somwhere that shows the parse time so I can compare? or am I thinking of a different system?

Thanks

Phil

[DrByte]

Changing cache-to-file instead of cache-to-database or none ... is moot. If your server's poorly tuned in general then changing that setting is not going to help anyway.

You can turn on the parse time under Admin->Configuration->Logging.