Reducing resources?

[swingandmiss]

Today I was alerted to the fact that a a few processes consumed more memory than my hosting plan allotes. This is a good thing, it means my business is growing. The bad thing is that I need to upgrade my hosting plan. Not a problem at all, comes with the territory, but I was wondering if there were any tweaks I could to do reduce the resource consumption.

The proceses in question are:

/orders.php?selected_box=customers&status=2&page=...

/index.php?main_page=login

/index.php?main_page=shopping_cart&sort=20a

The issue is each of the the above had used more than 16mb of memory.

Any advice?

[kobra]

Can you use .htaccess values in this file? If so add this line to that file

php_value memory_limit 32000000

Or get with a host that is sensitive to Zen Cart operation...

You only use this memory for a portion of a second.

[DrByte]

You're right - it does mean things are growing ... and that's a good thing!

/orders.php?selected_box=customers&status=2&page=...

I'm not sure which addon creates your "selected_box=customers" parameter, so can't really comment on that part.
The status=2 is from sorting based on orders_status=2 ("Processing").
As this is an admin function, it's only going to impact when you're sorting through the in-progress orders on your site.

/index.php?main_page=login

Customer login. I don't see why this would create much CPU time ... unless your server has to do some special extra work to do SSL mode or something.

/index.php?main_page=shopping_cart&sort=20a

The Shopping Cart. Hmmm ... if your customers have a lot of items in their cart, and if you have a lot of attributes connected to your products, and if you have numerous sale/specials activated, the shopping cart page can consume a fair bit of processing power.
This is a known issue that's been improved drastically in the in-development v1.4 code ... so there's hope for the future. Unfortunately there's not a lot that can be done on the storefront side to accommodate this in v1.3.x.


I hope your host isn't going to zap you with a huge price increase to use a little more RAM ... 16MB is a rather low setting nowadays. If they do increase your price significantly, be sure to check out our Certified Hosts (see "Hosting" link at the top of this page) to at least compare what a reasonable price is vs what your host is demanding from you.

[swingandmiss]

Can you use .htaccess values in this file? If so add this line to that file

php_value memory_limit 32000000

Or get with a host that is sensitive to Zen Cart operation...

You only use this memory for a portion of a second.

I believe I can do this. What does this parameter set?

[swingandmiss]

What has me confused, is that it's a relatively simple site.

13 products
Each order is usually less than 3 products
1800 total orders as of this time

My current host is recommending I upgrade to a dedicated server. I'd love to do that, but that just doesn't make sense right now based on the company size and the cost of such a server.

[swingandmiss]

Is it possible there is a memory leak through a persistent connection or something similar?

[DrByte]

Is it possible there is a memory leak through a persistent connection or something similar?

Zen Cart doesn't use persistent connections at the present time.

[swingandmiss]

Zen Cart doesn't use persistent connections at the present time.

Hmm...there goes that idea. Anything else you can think of that would be causing such a high memory usage? I'm getting told I need a dedicated server, which is shocking to me at this point.

[misty]

You could also try reducing size of images..some are
sized at 104686 bytes...should be no more than
3000..

[DrByte]

What has me confused, is that it's a relatively simple site.

13 products
Each order is usually less than 3 products
1800 total orders as of this time

My current host is recommending I upgrade to a dedicated server. I'd love to do that, but that just doesn't make sense right now based on the company size and the cost of such a server.

Right -- a dedicated server should not be necessary ..... unless your host has a zillion accounts on the same server you're on and they're overloading it.

Further to my earlier post, how many attributes do you have configured with your products? if any? What kind of tax calcs are being done?


Regardless even of the answer to those questions, if your host is limiting you to 16MB, ask them why that's a problem. As mentioned earlier, 16MB isn't exactly liberal. Most good hosts allow 64MB or more from my experience. Limiting you to 16MB isn't doing you any favors.


For your admin page, you could cut down the number of results per page and that might help limit the processing requirements ... but the default of 20 should be more than adequate. If you've got it set to 100 or more then I could see it using more resources.

For the shopping cart page, sorry, there's not much you can do about it in the code.