MegaPoor performance and mega slow site despair!

[pharqall]

I have just spent the last few days installing and configuring a new (1.3.7) install of Zen Cart on a new database and added 10 products to the database. I used Zen Cart a couple of years ago and was realtively pleased with it, but this time round it's a bit slowwwwww!!

I'm on 1and1 ( yes I know read the 30 posts about how rubbish their servers are ) and host several other sites with Mysql databases and I have nothing like the speed problems with all the other websites. I do not believe that the speed problem is purely down to the 1and1 server! There must be something with the code . . . or . . . . I've not set everything right to optimise speed.

The website at the moment is actually pretty unusable as it is, and I'm just about ready to slit my wrists after all the work I've just put in.

I've scoured the forum for the last couple of days for a " speed settings " tutorial or something similar, but there's just lots of disjointed information by lots of people who are all having similar problems with slow sites.

It would be really cool for someone to put together a speed settings checklist/tutorial and make it a sticky, so all us relative newbies could follow it.

I have turned off LOADS of settings, but there still might be more I've missed.

It would also help for someone in the know to have a quick look at the site:

[FONT="Arial Black"]Click here[/FONT] please to view and see how it performs for you???

Any helpful speed/optimisation feedback would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks

[DrByte]

Parse Time: 4.376 - Number of Queries: 155 - Query Time: 4.1910569645081

96% of the time it takes for your page to be served is waiting on your MySQL server to bring up the data. And at only 155 queries, that's really bad performance from your database.

This suggests that your MySQL server isn't configured for optimal performance, which is something only your hosting company can alter. And, I doubt 1and1 will do much for you unless they discover they've made a mistake in configuring it.

More testing shows the same problem continuously.

Parse Time: 10.649 - Number of Queries: 176 - Query Time: 10.49577900769
Parse Time: 5.322 - Number of Queries: 176 - Query Time: 5.0753827793274

Then either your data gets cached "finally" or maybe I found a couple seconds where the database load was a little less, and got these:

Parse Time: 0.555 - Number of Queries: 177 - Query Time: 0.33234362269592
Parse Time: 0.837 - Number of Queries: 435 - Query Time: 0.49667418183899

It doesn't seem to be a problem with your settings.

[pharqall]

Hi DrByte,

Thanks for your amazingly prompt look at the site.

I'll contact 1and1 and see if I can brow beat them into sorting something out for me. However, as I said, I do have several other sites that run absolutely fine with a lot larger databases and many more tables. I love the features of Zen-cart and have been with 1and1 for 8 years now without any problems ( maybe I'm just the lucky one! ).

I really don't think I would benefit from upgrading to a dedicated server, and I have loaded up a few other open source carts and other software, and they all run fine??

This is the only piece of software that has any lag problems!

What about speed settings?? Is there anything I can switch off or change to help speed things up??

Thanks

[Merlinpa1969]

turn OFF category counts
turn OFF manufacturers

remember that zen cart does much more than most other mysql processes,
and the parse times do show it to be a mysql issue,

there is no reason that 155 querries should take that long,
let alone 176 querries taking 10 seconds to parse

[pharqall]

Thanks for the tips Merlin, but I've already done that amongst a myriad of other things

[Merlinpa1969]

then your option is to contact 1 and 1 and move you to a different server,
or take a look at the hosts that are guaranteed to work and are optomized for heavy mysql use

[flicman]

What are you using to determine the information in your post, DrByte? My Zen-Cart site is also notably slower than the rest of my sites (including one running another shopping cart software), and I'm looking to optimize.

My cart is at http://www.elpunal.com/.

I'm not very savvy with Zen-Cart yet, but I'm trying to get there. Anything that I can turn off, I'm trying to, although I'm finding that I'm having trouble finding where things are configured.

Thanks!

[DrByte]

What are you using to determine the information in your post, DrByte?

On the footer of your site, on each page:

Parse Time: 3.812 - Number of Queries: 61 - Query Time: 3.0485559369507
Parse Time: 4.185 - Number of Queries: 390 - Query Time: 1.819455786499
Parse Time: 5.366 - Number of Queries: 324 - Query Time: 0.90010014041138
Parse Time: 3.216 - Number of Queries: 199 - Query Time: 2.2587748161163
Parse Time: 3.240 - Number of Queries: 94 - Query Time: 2.849111091629
Parse Time: 5.811 - Number of Queries: 371 - Query Time: 2.4693026439667

Your query counts appear fairly normal for v1.3.x, meaning most settings-optimizations are already done.

Most of your query times are fairly long, suggesting that the database is being slow in responding to requests for data.

Your parse times are a fair bit higher than your query times, meaning that not only is the database slow but your apache processes are also running slowly when preparing to send the page to the browser.

It seems your server is already gzip compressing content sent to the browser, so that step is already done too.

It would seem your server is just plain busy.

[flicman]

So I've set:
Admin > Configuration > Logging: Display The Page Parse Time = true

And I'm looking at my results:

Home Page:

Parse Time: 3.232 - Number of Queries: 51 - Query Time: 2.3936033117676

Category Page:

Parse Time: 9.036 - Number of Queries: 390 - Query Time: 9.6976505149384

Shopping Cart:

Parse Time: 2.316 - Number of Queries: 119 - Query Time: -4.8625352290344

I'm not sure what negative seconds are, but something's going on here.

Thanks for your thoughts.

[DrByte]

Don't get hung up on negative seconds.

If your Parse Time and Query Time are almost the same, your bottleneck is your database.