Slow Page Load Problem on Media Temple Grid Hosting

Hi there,

I have been using ZC for over 2 years and love it. I have a multisite module and have approx 2300 products across 3 stores. We also have a custom built tartan database and have the query cache module installed.

Normally, performance is somewhat sluggish (2-4 seconds for a page to load), however, for some products with a lot of attributes (such as this item) take significantly longer. I'm aware that it has a lot of attributes, and that is a known issue, however, adding this product to the shopping cart takes approximately 40 seconds to load but only 8 seconds of this is used up running database queries (to the best of my knowledge).

Further to that, some products such as this one have a lot of queries with a longish response time: Parse Time: 4.591 - Number of Queries: 639 - Query Time: 2.7954458689118

Our site is hosted on Media Temple's Grid Service, currently with their top level MySQL grid container, so the MySQL performance should be adequate.

I'd be grateful for some information on how we can improve the site performance. Is it simply a hosting issue? Would a dedicated server make much difference? Should we focus on reducing the number of database queries?

I read somewhere about some product pages only initiating 10-20 database queries - I would love to get to that level!

Also, if anyone is able to offer some help on this on a professional basis, please get in touch.

Parse Time: 7.536 - Number of Queries: 426 - Query Time: 1.5360349243774

This is slowwwwwww

This for example is pretty good with 11 attributes
Parse Time: 0.487 - Number of Queries: 161 - Query Time: 0.16364880925

Couple of things to help

This will help http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=1233

Total Page Size: 47.79 Kb.
Total objects on the site: 55
HTML Page Size: 47.79 Kb.

46 images is alot!

Reduce the images and optimize the JavaScript... this is kinda big

Optimize and clean your CSS

Also check out this http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

~Melanie

Hi Melanie,

Thanks for getting back to me. I forgot to subscribe to the thread so have just seen your reply now.

Unfortunately I mentioned in my original post that we are already using Query Cache.

I'll definitely look into optimising the CSS and JavaScript, however, I get the impression this can't be causing the biggest problems.

Are you referring to the 46 images on the Custom Casual Kilt outfit? If so, they are already pretty small and are not loaded when adding the product to the cart, so presumably can't be affecting that.

We recently did a test with Pimahosting.com with our database on a stock install of ZC and it was significantly faster, so either they're a great host, or there are some styling/customisation issues that are causing problems.

Does anyone that runs a largish site have any good tips for hosting? Both hosts that I've done test with recently are coming out faster than MediaTemple so thinking it is time to jump ship.

Any help/information would be much appreciated.

I'd say it's a hosting thing. Searching the forums for 'mediatemple' presents a lot of threads about slow servers.