Why is my site so slow?

PLEASE HELP ME!!!

I'm having problems with my zencart. Its very slow and I tried everything to make it faster.

I downloaded Image Handler 2 and made all the changes to my admin & GZip and I got nothing.

Here is the link to my site: http://www.buildmybar.com/store.

I would really appreciate it if someone can take a look at my site and offer any advice in fixing this. THANKS A BUNCH!

:dontgetit

ralceus I have a similar problem with my site and have tried everything that was suggested but still the same no real improvement.

Once you get an answer I would like to know so that I can do the same to my site.

admin> config > logging > display parse times

Report back time for main page and a product page

Hi Kobra,

Thanks for responding. So do i click "display parse times" true or false? Right now i have it on false.

Thanks!

To be able to see them it must be "true"

there is a fix for the page dropping down with IH turned on,
you need to move the jscript files for image handler that it puts in template default,
you need to move these to your custom template folder,

61 Images on the main page is quite a few, granted they are all fairly small in size its still alot,.....

Since this is a template monster template in not sure if you will be able to display the page parse times, they remove the code in alot of their templates for some reason.......

Zen Cart still is slow! I use globat.com as my hosting service. Does anyone know if this could be the reason why its slow. If so, does anyone know of a better hosting site that guarantee a fast working zen cart site? If not, I'm gonna give up with this and use another cart software. Please Help!

ralceus did you try checking your setting on the admin/configuration.php file to chmod 644 and see if that speeds it up as it did on my site a bit. Also check the admin/includes/configure.php and set to chmod 444

Nine times outta ten, slow sites and poor parse times are caused by overcrowded servers.

Consider swapping over to one of the Certified Hosts from the title bar in this site. These hosting providers are optimised to run Zen Cart stores and deal with the excessive queries produced by ZC.

I've read these forums many, many times and every time someone swaps to a certified host, they're absolutely amazed at the difference.

Thank you to everyone that responded to my help. I ended up having to switch hosting accounts to bluehost and now my site is faster than ever!

http://www.buildmybar.com

You have a pretty site ... :smile:

However ... you might peek at it in FireFox vs IE and see why you have so much space at the top in FireFox ...

Makes for a lot of extra scrolling around the site ... :unsure:

looks like IH2 Miss configuration ..

Just curious how I would diagnose if it is MySql that is slow or PHP. I ended up customizing the classic template a little. I resized all the images attached to 6k products. Changed all the suggested ways to speed up my zen cart.

My parse times are usually 16 , 135 Queries and Query time 22.

sometimes it loads very fast but mostly its pretty high gaining up to 30-45 parse time.

I'm with GoDaddy now, (gag i know) and will be switching to a certified Zen Cart host in the very near future.

I just wanted to know if I can absolutely say it lies with GoDaddy.

Prior to loading in 6k products I had 1k and everything seems to move very fast.

Parse times are listed on my page.. you may have to highlight the very bottom due to a black background.

Ok, to update I ended up removing a component and testing until I felt there was a speed inscrease. The initial front page loads up faster now, the products still upload a tad slow but still faster than they were. The worst problem came from an embedded YouTube video which wasn't all that big but I guess enough to choke everything out.

I'm not sure if this is the exact cause, who knows maybe the past few days GoDaddy was having some issues. In any event I will continue to monitor and see where it takes me.

So, I made a switch over to Hostmonster. I did like GoDaddy however the shared hosting was not good for me.

Since I switch I've been getting very ######## times:

Parse Time: 0.847 - Number of Queries: 190 - Query Time: 0.350813339188

So, there is a reason they have Recommended Hosting services listed. Do the right thing. Switch. :)

.8 seconds and .3 seconds ...

is that first hit? second hit?

Have you a site that we could perhaps peek at to see what is really slow and what is not?

NOTE: many would kill for those times ...

Granted I could be have a dense moment and just noticed your old times and that you were actually saying your times rule now ... :lamo:

That is after I transferred my entire site to Hostmonster. My times before with GoDaddy were 14 and 9 roughly.

Im not quite sure what you mean first or second hit. I checked it from a few computers and different areas and it seems consistent on those times.

Of course as I'm responding to your post and I decided to check it again I get a 4.4 and 3.2 lol :)

Regardless I'm much happier with the performance from Hostmonster.

First hit is the first time you hit a page/link on your site vs the 2nd time you hit the same page/link (not with a refresh but by using the link/url) ...

The time difference is what is cached by MySQL ... so an active site is, generally, faster as other people are hitting these pages/links so that they are cached ...

One test is to go to All Products then check the speed of each page and then re-check the speed ... you will usually find the 2nd time through faster ...

Ajeh:

The time difference is what is cached by MySQL ... so an active site is, generally, faster as other people are hitting these pages/links so that they are cached ...
Cache built in MySQL does not (in general) improve performance of Zen Cart. It might seem it does, but it doesn't. It improves performance of stores with very very low traffic only (when there's only one or two visitors on the site).

The thing with MySQL cache (NOT Query Cache zen cart module) is that it stores query results as long as every table query refers to is not updated. If even one row of any referenced table gets updated MySQL won't use cached result and will execute query again. And - unfortunately - Zen Cart has little flaw that makes every query-worth-to-be-cached uncachable: it updates products table every time someone visits product page.

As I wrote it might seem that the site is faster with MySQL cache but it isn't. It seems faster because:

• You are probably the only visitor on Your site
• You've accessed the same page in very short period of time. This does not happen on live site with mid to high traffic (I'm not sure about low traffic sites - haven't tested it)

As soon as the site will receive more traffic probability of using cached result will drop exponentially. Even low traffic sites won't gain much from MySQL cache. If page takes 20 seconds to load the visitor most probably already views competitors sites and closed browser window. Sure, if someone will visit EXACTLY the same page within few seconds it will load quickly, but probability of that happening is (very?) low.