Zen Cart - How much traffic can it handle?

[emtecmedia]

Hi,

Had a search but cant seem to find any threads covering this. We currently use Zen Cart on a site which receives a mediocre amount of traffic and it performs fine. We are however looking at a new project which will receive between 5000 and 10000 unique users a day, would zen cart be able to handle this kind of traffic effectively or is it more a small project solution?

Does anyone know of any large ecommerce sites out there using zen cart?

I know it comes down to server hardware and software just as much as the site script but obviously once a larger amount of traffic is experienced its wise to make sure the site is up to the job.

Look forward to your feedback.

Thanks,
Brad.

[Ajeh]

You are limited by the limits of your hosting site's configuration for the server that your domain is on ...

Zen Cart does not have limitations to it ... it is only held back by the MySQL limits or server limits that you are on ...

[emtecmedia]

You are quite right in what you say, from your experience and research how do you find zen cart compares to other carts (paid and free) in regards to server load?

Does it compare with something like elastic path or magento?

Brad.

[Merlinpa1969]

Please use production carts for comparison,
Magenta is still in Aplha last time I looked at it

[Ajeh]

I write Zen Cart so it is hard for me to tell you otherwise ... but Zen Cart rulez and other carts drool ...

[emtecmedia]

Has anyone actually done any research into it? Is there any true comparisons out there?

[Stuff4Toys]

Has anyone actually done any research into it? Is there any true comparisons out there?

IMHO: You may not see commercial reviews of Zen-Cart compared to the MAINLINE commercial packages that are in use by Sears, Wallmart and the other top 500 sites, or even commercially hosted packages like Yahoo, Shopsite, Miva or Monstercommerce.

From my experience Zen-Cart will handle all the traffic YOUR configuration will provide. If you are on GoDaddy's Economy shared hosting, Zen-Cat will have a tough time handling 10,000 hits per day. On a high end dedicated server with MySQL running locally on a fast raid array, with a great hosting partners network there is no reason why Zen-Cart could not handle thousands of sales per day or even per hour if you build the system correctly for the load.

Remember, even Yahoo Stores went down because they did not prepare properly for Monday's load!

Just my .02 worth
JOhn ><>

[ronpeled]

Yes. ZenCart can handle the traffic you are describing. from 1.2.x to 1.3.x there were some serious performance optimizations done on the cart which allows it to scale much better.

While it is true that it is far from being perfect performance wise, zencart on the right hardware and with the right Apache/MySQL configurations can scale quite a bit.

We have implemented ZenCart on certain large ecommerce stores (integrated to POS systems) with anywhere between 10K-40K products and heavy traffic loads. So far so good.

The only true contender to ZenCart at the moment is Magento but it is too early to decide. Magento is too new/fresh.

-Ron

[Merlinpa1969]

lol the cart your refering to is lika a pretty red sports car with shiny new paint,
lots o chrome,

and a 3 cylinder metro engine, with manual locks manual windows and an AM radio with an 8 track tape player.

looks great but looks can be deceiving

[ronpeled]

I will not put down any new development based on the Zend Framework - backed by IBM and Zend Corporation (creators of PHP).