Admin Log In Screen (and Cart) VERY slow to display

**ts232** · 19 Jun 2012, 07:23 PM

I will keep digging. Quick question though: when is a php session created for admin and shopping cart? For the former, is it at the blank admin login page or after the first log in attempt? For the shopping cart, is it at the first "add to cart" button press? Knowing this will help me diagnose with my VPS host for possible PHP/apache issues that could be slowing down the session creation. Thanks.

**DrByte** · 19 Jun 2012, 11:25 PM

A session is created, or updated, or recreated, on each click/hit to your site.

First visit: session created
Next click: session updated, since already exists.
Start SSL page: session recreated (unless you've turned that off for some peculiar reason) to prevent hijacking

So, the simple answer is: a session is created/updated EVERY time you click (including the first visit).

But I'm somewhat doubtful about your idea that the situation is session-related.

**prestontmitch** · 30 Jun 2012, 05:08 PM

I have the exact same thing going on with my install. The login page takes 25-40 seconds to load but once it loads everything loads at normal speeds.

**ts232** · 30 Jun 2012, 05:14 PM

I spent a lot of time optimizing my site, and improved the performance significantly. Pingdom.com is a useful tool for this. I experimented with different cache settings in zencart and on the server. The google pagespeed optimization also helped out.

At the end of the day however, the initial admin page was still loading slowly, as were the shopping cart pages. Overall performance was still highly variable. I decided to bite the bullet and switch to a dedicated server and the pages are all loading very quickly now. A HUGE improvement. It is a lot more expensive, but if I just get one or two extra sales a month then it will be worth it.

In general, I would recommend doing all the optimizations you can before switching to dedicated. It is possible to speed the site up significantly with some minor tweaks and images resizes etc.

**Camaro** · 10 Jul 2012, 07:43 PM

It happens to me sometimes too, but it's very rare and i don't mind that. Try to clean cache maybe?

**athena** · 10 Jul 2012, 10:18 PM

Just commenting that what resolved this issue for us (THANK YOU THANK YOU!) was to follow the advice in the article below mentioned by DrByte - specifically Admin>Tools>Store Manger>Cleanup Debug Log Files>Confirm