Database Questions

[bgroup99]

Hi,

1) When I upgraded from ZC v1.3.5 to v1.3.6 I created a blank database "newstore" in the process to use for the installation process. My orginal database (the one I was using with ZC v1.3.5) was called "store". I now have the 2 databases: "store" and "newstore". Do I need to keep "store" for any reason? Is it necessary in any way (I have backups of "newstore")?

2) I've noticed recently that my store is running very low at some levels. Browsing categories, subcategories, and pages such as Home, About Us, Shipping Ino, etc. parse times are fine at about 3-5 seconds. However, as soon as I click on a product to see the product info page the parse times go all the way up to 20-30 seconds? Is this a database issue? My address is http://shop.thebricktongroup.com. If anyone could take a look and offer advice I'd really appreciate it.

2a) Would deleting items from my database speed things up? I have about 9000 products, although many are inactive right now.

3) I've been having problems searching for products. They are definately in my catelog, but they don't show up. I'm getting help on this problem in this thread, http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showth...191#post289191, but I was wondering if this problem could some how be related to #2?

Thanks for any help/suggestions. I really appreciate it!

[nigelt74]

Do you have imagehandler installed?

Your site took a while to load for me, and i noticed some of your little images on the main page are around 33KB in size

My guess is that the pages which contain images are the ones that take ages to load as most of the ones in the information section took a few seconds for me while the other pages took considerably longer

On your main page

the marine Audio image is about 50Kb in size (25285.gif) which is pretty huge for a thumbnail image,
if you do have imagehandler installed make sure it can handle gifs

Cheers

[bgroup99]

Hi and thanks for your feedback. I do not have image handler installed. I have all my pictures in small, medium, and large formats. I'm not sure exactly how I use imagehandler. I had it installed, but I couldn't really figure it out... Any tips?

What I've noticed is the product info pages themselves take the longest to load and they just have one image... Any ideas?

[Ajeh]

For giggles and grins ... what happens if you turn off the Category Counts?

Configuration ... My Store ...

Show Category Counts
Count recursively how many products are in each category

true
false

[Ajeh]

Also, do your database tables appear to have all of the indexes?

[bgroup99]

Hi and thanks for your responses.

Is turning off category counts supposed to help by making my site load faster or is it to address the problem I had searching admin, because I may have some more info on the search problem (see below).

I'm not sure how to check if my database tables have all of their indexes, but if you don't mind telling me I would be more than happy to check.

I deleted a bunch of products (8000+) from my database and now only have 250. My search function in admin seems to be working, at least for the moment. Does anyone have an idea what this means? Is there some problem that prevents me from searching when I have too many products? I'd like to fix it so I can add products once again.

My site also appears to be running faster after deleting the products. Would this point to an issue with my host's MySQL being a problem?

Thanks for all your help!

[Ajeh]

I'd vote on a slow host if dropping your count from just 8000 products speeds it up that much ...