Time outs during Checkout - DB problem? Help?

[buzzville]

I've been dealing with major checkout issues for the past few days. Some background: site has been running at reasonable speed for almost a year - lots of successful transactions both through authorize.net and Paypal Express Checkout. But, last week we suddenly started experiencing some intermitent slow load times in admin and the shop. Then, this weekend, the checkout process suddenly started timing out on virtually every attempt. I assumed it was a host issue and called them. They checked at their end and said everything looked fine, but that I might have a scripting error or db optimization issues. So, I read a bunch about optimization and followed the steps in phpmyadmin. Everything seemed to go fine with the optimization, but the time outs during checkout were still there.

Every now and then, a transaction will go through successfully, so things are working *some* of the time. Unfortunately, we also have 2 instances of a transaction going through at the Admin end, but it doesn't seem to get processed through authorize.net (AIM module). In other words, completed transactions with no billing (including a test I was conducting using the automatic decline credit card number!). I took the site down today and uploaded a backup of the site, in case something got somehow corrupted. Problem is still there. I also removed and re-installed the Authorize.net AIM module thinking this might help. Still no luck.

My host still fervently maintains that everything is fine at their end, and that it must be something in the DB. They've washed their hands of the problem, and I'm on my own. I'm at the last resort of restoring a backup of my DB, but I cringe at the thought of what will be lost - orders, customer data, sales data, etc. So, I'm hoping someone might have another possible solution, including maybe just restoring one or a couple of the DB tables, rather than the entire DB?

Some observations: the time outs are more severe in IE7 (gives 404 page), but Firefox seems to hang in there longer and sometimes gets the page loaded, although *very* slowly. When Firefox fails, there is a blank page. The time outs occur when trying to load these pages:

https://superbuzzy.com/index.php?mai...ckout_shipping

and

https://superbuzzy.com/index.php?mai...eckout_payment

You can get to both of these and observe the painfully slow load-time and or timeout without actually completing the transaction.

I'm running 1.3.7 with a bunch of mods: Attributes Controller, Simple Google Analytics, Image Handler, Super Orders, Stocks by Attributes, Singapore, Newsletter Subscribe.

PHP is 4.3.11, MySQL 4.0.27 Server load times look to be ok - haven't seen anything over 2.0 since this started happening, assuming these are accurate.

I'm getting pretty desperate at this point, and would really appreciate suggestions of what might be going on, or how I might troubleshoot this further. I'm no expert! Of course, what I haven't mentioned yet is that my host is GoDaddy (eek!). I'm taking them at their word for the moment that this is not their problem, but perhaps I shouldn't?!?

[uasport]

I'm having the same problem all of a sudden, My site is hosted by GoDaddy also.

[uasport]

I found my issue. I disabled the USPS shipping module and my cart works fine. Now I need to figure out why the USPS module is timing out the cart and giving me problems. I'm currently in testing and want to go live on April 1st. My USPS module is in production phase and worked fine before. My future customers will want the USPS cheaper shipping rates.

Try it and get back to me. Any ideas on killing the country drop down on the create acct. page. We will only ship to US customers and it looks like a little TOO much if I was a customer creating an account.

[DrByte]

I've been dealing with major checkout issues for the past few days. Some background: site has been running at reasonable speed for almost a year - lots of successful transactions both through authorize.net and Paypal Express Checkout. But, last week we suddenly started experiencing some intermitent slow load times in admin and the shop.

... my host is GoDaddy (eek!). I'm taking them at their word for the moment that this is not their problem, but perhaps I shouldn't?!?

Authorize.net and PayPal Express Checkout both use CURL to communicate to external services. On GoDaddy, this requires use of their Proxy server to do that.
I suspect the problem is with timeouts between your server, the proxy server and the external services.

[uasport]

I use PayPal IPN and still experienced the timing out. ?????

[DrByte]

Please enable debug logging and post logs for investigation.
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=61199

What version of Zen Cart are you using?

[uasport]

Thanks for the advice. My site checkout is GOOD after I disabled the USPS shipping module, but I don't consider that a permanent fix. I'm running 1.3.7

[buzzville]

This was basically the last straw from GoDaddy for me. I switched hosts (thank you Camelot Hosting!), and now everything is working smoothly. Repeat - whatever problem I was having was fixed by switching hosts, despite what I was told by GoDaddy. Camelot transferred the site as-is and everything is now working smoothly. Might be worth a call to GoDaddy to tell them this. Good luck!

[Ajeh]

Thanks for the update and glad to hear that one of our Zen Cart Certified Hosting sites was able to get you fixed up the right way ...

Good luck with your site!

[Seamstobesew]

I had a problem like this crop up today myself and had I not seen this note about it being a USPS module for shipping, it occurred to me that I had not reinstalled the Canada Post module, and that turned out to be the fix for the solution as well. So it doesn't necessarily need to be USPS, if you have any module that deals with the shopping_cart.php file, it's worth checking it to be sure you can resolve it.

Either or, I'm just glad to have it fixed now,

All the sites I maintain now are finally caught up to 1.37.

Marian