Slow loading - Session related?

[schizoman]

There's been a number of posts about slow-loading Zen Cart pages, but I haven't seen anyone have quite the same problem as we're experiencing.

We just changed hosting companies. This problem didn't show up until we made the change.

We're on a dedicated server, hosting 29 sites. Some are HTML, and some are PHP. Two use Zen Cart. Our problem is only with the two Zen Cart sites.

The first time we access our site, the home page takes 20+ seconds to load. The message bar reads "Waiting for...." After that, any page access takes a second or two. MySQL times are always less than a second, regardless of overall load time. To make the site load slowly again, I have to close and re-open my browser.

To me, this suggests something to do with session handling. More specifically, I suspect something amiss with session creation, since it's only the first access that loads slowly.

Can anyone point me to where I should look for configuration problems? We're running Apache on Fedora. Any help would be appreciated.

[schizoman]

My partner came up with a solution for this. In our case, all we had to do was go to the administration area. Under configuration=>sessions, there's a setting called "IP to Host Conversion Status." We changed this from true to false and the slow initial loading time disappeared. Hope this helps someone else.

[kendur]

My partner came up with a solution for this. In our case, all we had to do was go to the administration area. Under configuration=>sessions, there's a setting called "IP to Host Conversion Status." We changed this from true to false and the slow initial loading time disappeared. Hope this helps someone else.

You gave me hope for a second. But upon checking it was already turned off

[Kim]

Is your MYSQL server on the dedicated server?

[kendur]

I got mine loading much faster by going through and limiting the amount of images shown and optimizing the page using the tool you post.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/s...utergames.com/

Very helpful by the way. I knocked off several hundred K from the HP.
It's getting to acceptable rates I believe.

Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 257.18 seconds
28.8K 130.29 seconds
33.6K 112.16 seconds
56K 68.66 seconds
ISDN 128K 23.39 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 5.13 seconds


On an off subject, I noted that the field "products_id" in the "products_description" table is set as auto increment.
This is supposed to match the field "products_id" in the "products" table.

The problem is if you have something go amiss during adding a product the product_id in the product table advances but the description table does not. This tosses things off a notch.

What I did was add a field to the products_description called ID and assigned the primary key to this. Then any new additions use the new product_id from the products table to populate the products_id field in the products_description table.

I'm not sure if I broke anything that I'll encounter on down the road but this fixed the problem I had loading large amounts of products and a disconnect or timeout happens.

Ken

[Kim]

Ken -

You still have a problem - the page is nearly 400k - Ideal is under 100. Second is you are pulling images from "offsite" and that will always be slower than images hosted on your own server.

[DrByte]

On an off subject, I noted that the field "products_id" in the "products_description" table is set as auto increment.
This is supposed to match the field "products_id" in the "products" table.

The problem is if you have something go amiss during adding a product the product_id in the product table advances but the description table does not. This tosses things off a notch.

What I did was add a field to the products_description called ID and assigned the primary key to this. Then any new additions use the new product_id from the products table to populate the products_id field in the products_description table.

I'm not sure if I broke anything that I'll encounter on down the road but this fixed the problem I had loading large amounts of products and a disconnect or timeout happens.

Ken

That's overkill. Just removing the auto-increment would be simpler, and is the approach used in future versions of Zen Cart.

[kendur]

I'm having the exact same trouble. In fact it's why I'm here now.

Once I'm inside it's lightning fast. It's just that initial first visit to the homepage.
And unfortunately people are impatient.
My forum is very quick to load I might add.

I'm on a dedicated virtual server at Godaddy after moving from their shared hosting.
I have 22,000 items in my catalog.
I want to add more but am a bit scared to slow the site down anymore.

I do see that the sessions table always has overhead even if I'm the only one at the site.
I was also thinking that perhaps the selection of "New Products" may be a factor.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Ken