slow search on site

[Biker Trends]

Hello fellow Zen Cart bloggers,


Need help if any one can answer this, how do you speed up the search bar? My search on the site takes for ever, about 20 seconds. We are on version V1.3.9D. Our company has over 200,000 products up. We are being hosted by Go Daddy on an apache server. We spent a bit recently on developing and are still having trouble with the general search. I am not sure if it is the server or our site. I would like to know the problem and get it addressed before we come back into our season.(We are a motorcycle shop)
Here is a link to our site:
http://www.bikertrends.com/
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Dorothy Smith

[twitchtoo]

Are you using a dedicated server with boat loads of CPU and RAM ?

[Biker Trends]

No, not dedicated, basic plan with Go Dadday on an apache server. We have about 500 people on our site at any given time but those are mostly bots, I have been thinking it was our server but I do not want to switch with out knowing that will cure the issue. Also I have asked Go Daddy before and they said we do not use a lot of bandwidth that we are allowed.

Dorothy Smith

[gjh42]

200,000 products is a huge quantity, in the range of what I have read posts about top-notch developers doing special configurations and optimizations for. If you are not expert in these optimizations, you may want to hire someone who is. And if you do not have extra-fast server resources a search that has to consider hundreds of thousands of products could easily get bogged down. I suggest that godaddy is not an appropriate host for a site with serious handling needs.

[Biker Trends]

Our company has a few plugins that optimize it for us that has been working well, our developer is good and he has some experience with Zen Cart, it was a little bit slower and we have made vast improvements, if you click from goggle to our site it is lightning fast, search by category is quick, just our search bar search is very slow. Maybe there are other optimizers that will speed up the search.(sql?) Go Daddys dedicated server from what they say is suppose to be very good, some of there reps say it would be a good switch others say its over kill unless you have 1,000 or more customers on your site at one time. Any other good hosting options? Also I want to make sure that helps before signing a contract and boosting the server cost that much.

[twitchtoo]

I have moved a dedicated server on GoDaddy to another new dedicated server with GoDaddy with 4+ times the power and it completely solved the slowness backup we experienced in the past. Very happy with the changeover, the server power and the added expense was made back in sales.