Admin CPU issues

[kobra]

SSL -- I can't disable, as it affects

No - - If you have your admin running under SSL then what about when it is not?
Your admin configure.php is where this is set

[apogeerockets]

How many customers and orders do you have? If there there are a lot (like over 1000), it can slow down the admin significantly due to the large query results

Ha! Yeah, we're at over 15,000 customer accounts and 28,000 orders since 2013. I can see that slowing down some pages, but I'm not understanding how that would affect page load time on configuration settings.

[mc12345678]

Also what kind of logging is enabled on admin->configuration->logging (I think that's the title).

How many files are in your cache directory? (Have had admin crawl occur if that directory is filled with numerous files.)

Ha! Yeah, we're at over 15,000 customer accounts and 28,000 orders since 2013. I can see that slowing down some pages, [B]but I'm not understanding how that would affect page load time on configuration settings.[B]

Might have overlooked the above, but it has an impact if it's an issue.

[apogeerockets]

No - - If you have your admin running under SSL then what about when it is not?
Your admin configure.php is where this is set

I know where and how to turn it off. But access to the CC processor configs is cutoff when it's off. I don't recall offhand if the admin being off SSL affects the frontend checkout functionality of authorize.net, but either way I will need to wait to test this until later because turning SSL off forces all my admins to reset their passwords.

[apogeerockets]

Might have overlooked the above, but it has an impact if it's an issue.

Logging -- all set to false.
Cache -- 3 (indexes and htaccess and minify folder)

[mc12345678]

I know where and how to turn it off. But access to the CC processor configs is cutoff when it's off. I don't recall offhand if the admin being off SSL affects the frontend checkout functionality of authorize.net, but either way I will need to wait to test this until later because turning SSL off forces all my admins to reset their passwords.

Feel free to kick me later, but technically it's when SSL is turned back on that the passwords need to be reset. :)

[mc12345678]

Have you gone through the FAQs about performance tuning?

[RodG]

Noted! I didn't like the lightbox system my original frontend template provided, so I went back to lightbox from my 1.5.1 install and didn't check support on it. I'll update that at some point.

Along the same lines, I see you also have both FEC and Cowoa listed among your add-ons. I think these were integrated into a single module way back in 2009?

Although this won't be the cause of your problem either, this is probably going to be a good time to suggest that you clean up (remove) any modules that you aren't actually using (and update those that you are).

Having unused/outdated modules hanging around is a significant security risk, and frankly speaking, it makes a mockery of the SSL that you (and many others) feel can't be without. (IOW, us hackers are laughing at you ;-)

Dare I even mention that each module has the potential to cause problems and conflicts, and upgrades can be a nightmare.

we're at over 15,000 customer accounts and 28,000 orders since 2013

Wow, that's quite a busy site you have there.

This, and the fact that you stated 'it seems to have been slowly running down and down' (as opposed to something that happened overnight) is suggesting *to me* that you could simply be overloading the server. (Either the webserver, but more likely, the SQL server).

Activating the "page parse time" could be useful here.

Shared server or VPS?
How much RAM?

Cheers
RodG

[mc12345678]

Merge of FEC and COWOA: yes and no. There is still a version of COWOA available that is independent of FEC, but FEC also recognizes some aspect of COWOA (meaning the code has the acronym in it somewhere...) Not sure if they are designed to work together or possibly together, but I know each can be installed individually and yes, the more installed, the more opportunities to infiltrate. Just trying to explain what little I know about each of the two plugins. :)

[apogeerockets]

Along the same lines, I see you also have both FEC and Cowoa listed among your add-ons. I think these were integrated into a single module way back in 2009?

FEC is installed, but isn't actually used -- just COWOA. Stuck around on the upgrade from 1.5.1 to 1.5.4, I guess.

Wow, that's quite a busy site you have there.

This, and the fact that you stated 'it seems to have been slowly running down and down' (as opposed to something that happened overnight) is suggesting *to me* that you could simply be overloading the server. (Either the webserver, but more likely, the SQL server).

Activating the "page parse time" could be useful here.

Shared server or VPS?
How much RAM?

Yeah, we're now averaging 30-40 orders a day through the site.

We kept overreaching our resource limit (80% of our alloted resources on the shared server were going to IMAP accounts in the office), so we literally just upgraded to a VPS (1gb RAM, looks like) this last week and honestly the admin seems to be running more painfully slow than ever (no change on the front end speed, fortunately and unfortunately). I'll activate parse times (i think my front end template removed the placeholder for it, so I'll have to add it back in), and see if I can locate a slow query log activation on the server. If I'm overloading the SQL server, do you have suggestions on how to track that, and possibly fix it?

I might have to bring an outside consultant into look at our stuff directly and see where things are getting overloaded. I'm all self-taught in web development, so I'm sure there are things I'm missing that would seem obvious to a learned or veteran developer. I'm also getting increasingly paranoid that we're outgrowing zencart, but I picked this software because it's easy to customize and seemed scalable.