Cache and Performance issues

[GreggShort]

I'm struggling with a rather large site for zen-cart with about 70K-120K records. It runs so-so on my laptop and horrible on the VPS web host. The test site is caravantest.com and the store is available at http://www.caravantest.com/partsDB/

I've got the database cache set to file, but I don't see any files written to the directory. Sessions are written to the db. Can someone explain the general workings of the cache? Does a query have to run X times before it hits the cache? I'm assuming that I should be using the file cache over db...right?

Any comments on speeding things up? What server hardware would you believe to be sufficient to handle this site. It's pretty simple other than the item count, without manufactures, item counts, pictures, and other things to slow it down.

Any hosts out there that want to prove that it can run fast!

Thanks,

Gregg Short
GShort.com Web marketing and design

[email protected]

[kobra]

You do not look to be optimized for DB intensive operations or are mod_throttled in the VPS??

Your pages look sparse and should load fast....can/or do you have gzip enabled? This will only give you a bit of increase

[Merlinpa1969]

you may want to add more categories and drll it down a little bit
70 thousand products in one category is rather tedious, and this should also help with some speed

[stevefriedman71]

I hope it's the right place for this question...

I'm redoing my site and have one product that has 5 options. and 2 of these options have up to 110 values each (very customizable product)
But... when the customer want's to open the product page it almost stops loading for a long time and then, all of the sudden, the page is there. but no customer wants to wait a minute on a screen that doesn't do anything... even on cable...
I have deleted these to options and the product page loads fast as expected...
so... how do i improve the option fetching from the db so the customers don't have to wait for hours???

[Kim]

Steve- Is G-Zip enabled on your server? Try without it.

[stevefriedman71]

my gzip compression in the zen-admin is set to off (0) and the install is the newest version 1.3.7.1