Shopping cart page producing 500 errors

I am using 1.3.8a.

I have a customer who is placing her 8th order on my site. Never had issues before. She is placing 14 items in her cart with some of the products having multiples (in all, 27 physical items).

all of the items in the cart have at least one attribute, many of them have two or more.

every time she goes to checkout, she gets to the shopping cart page to verify the cart items and she gets a 500 error. she has tried from 4 different computers.

i logged in as her and was unable to access her shopping cart page. i am also getting a 500 error.

i logged in as another customer and placed an order just fine. no problems accessing the cart page.

i went into the database and cleared out her cart. I then logged in as her and added the items she wanted into her cart. i am now getting the 500 errors when trying to checkout again. only on the shopping cart page.

i managed to get into her cart one time so it appears to be an intermittent problem but most often you simply cannot get through. but the one time i did get through i saw the following:

Parse Time: 57.902 - Number of Queries: 18488 - Query Time: 51.95510854274

:censored:

any insight as to how i can make this stop happening would be much appreciated.

the site is https://www.orchidlakecandles.com

thank you!

You could try deleting her account and then setting up a fresh account for her, just to see if it's maybe a corrupt field somewhere in the database only affecting this account... since you said you can place an order as other customers.

Those parse times are crazy!! Are you hosted on GoDaddy or something??

Do you get those parse times on all your pages?

I get Parse Time: 7.298 - Number of Queries: 313 - Query Time: 4.6454229585419 from the UK viewing your home page. Which is really bad.

i am using netfirms (in canada) for hosting. the times are awful. i am planning on calling them to see what they can do about them.

on a side note, i have removed the right sideboxes on all checkout pages and the shopping cart page in an effort to reduce db queries.

You should consider one of the Zen Cart certified hosts in the Certified Hosts link above. These guys run ZC optimised plans to deal with the excessive ZC DB Queries ....

I am using one of the certified hosts and Parse times are less than a second.

i called netfirms and they, of course, support oscommerce installations and not zen cart. they wouldn't help much other than to say that they are seeing regular hits of 17,000 to 18,000 queries when this customer's shopping cart is loaded. he said that there isn't much they can do and that although the zen cart installation is working as it is supposed to, the db queries are killing it.

oh what a pain in the ######## it would be to change hosts now... hehehe

Actually, it's not as bad as all that. The 'best' certified hosts will migrate your site for you. Usually onto a temporary URL so you can approve it before re-pointing the nameservers. When it's all done and ready to switch over, you just need to point the nameservers at the new host. Pretty painless when you consider these guys even do the file transfers for you.

How'd you get on with deleting and re-creating a new account for your best customer? Did that solve the checkout problem?

no, i didn't delete her account and recreate it since she would lose her order history and quick re-order items. i removed some of the items from her cart and now you can get to her shopping cart page about 50% of the time, the other 50% still generates a 500 error.

i did look through the certified ZC hosts and selected one. i called them today and signed up. their techie guy is currently migrating all of my data over to the new server (poor guy! i have 2 domains and almost 20 gig of data to copy over). but they are taking care of the entire migration for me and will test the zen cart operation before anything goes live which is wonderful. i should know in a couple of days whether moving hosts was the answer.

thanks for your attention and suggestions on my problem limelites.

Well, even if it doesn't get to the root of your temperamental database/customer situation, at least it'll sort out your parse times and slow pages.

Fingers crossed it's a related issue and it'll solve the weird problem you're having with your customer login/order too.

Let me know how it pans out. Will be interested :-)

hehehe limelites... i didn't ask and you didn't tell, but somehow i ended up where you did. to say the least, it was a great move. they moved my site over today and i am now experiencing your 'less than a second' parse times. i cannot believe i didn't do this before and i cannot believe how fast my site is now.

consider my problem resolved. =)

Great. They're a fabulous host, very helpful too :-) Hope it also sorted the customer database/login problem?

after several attempts we were able to get her checked out before we moved to the new host. it wasn't pretty and i added freebies to her order and gave her her own discount code for her troubles, but everyone seems happy with the new performance the site is experiencing.

if it had been a first time customer, i am sure i would have lost the sale. but as i mentioned in my first post, she is a repeat customer and was very forgiving of the craziness.