Just got to 20,097 items and can't view categories/products in Catalog tab???

Not sure what happened here, but my last spreadsheet put me over the 20,000 items, and coincidentally I can't view my categories/products from the Catalog tab in Admin anymore. Not sure if anyone else has had this problem, but I plan to have many, many more than 20,000 products in my store, so I would like to fix this if it is possible. Could images be a problem? Image size? Just too many products, maybe? If there is a better version of this Zen Cart that costs money, can someone clue me in as to where to find that and how much it may be? Any helpful info would be great!!

Kristofer

The technical limit to number of products in Zen Cart is in the billions, so that's not your problem. 20,000 is just getting into the "large quantities" area. There is not an "improved, enterprise" version - everyone has access to the best. Your problem may be with your server or hosting environment, as large numbers can tax the speed of operations and perhaps cause timeouts.
V2.0 will have greatly improved database query handling and speed.

That sucks. I have it hosted with GoDaddy, so I would assume their servers would be able to handle what I have in there. Any ideas on an estimated time for V 2.0 to be ready? Is there anything I can do to speed things up in the meantime? Maybe adjusting the length of time for the timeout? I am guessing it is at 180 seconds, but I am not sure. I am not really an expert at what little things can be done in the back end of a site script to help it out in a case like this. Thanks for the good info so far.

Kristofer

Search the forum for comments on Godaddy hosting. They overload their servers such that database-driven sites often bog down. If you hope to make real money from your site, get real hosting.

Any ideas on what real hosting may be? I thought GoDaddy was up on top.

We're not supposed to discuss/recommend actual names here, but the ones in Certified Hosts above are proven to work well. Ask any other host you are considering how many sites are on a typical server, and some other questions you can get from reading suggestions in the forum.
(People can send recommendations by PM.)

BenhamCollectibles:

Not sure what happened here, but my last spreadsheet put me over the 20,000 items, and coincidentally I can't view my categories/products from the Catalog tab in Admin anymore. Not sure if anyone else has had this problem,

Probably your biggest problem is, as gjh42 pointed out, due to your choice of hosting. However, I have also experienced the same problem on a dedicated server and I have a suggestion that may help, which is: Create/use more catagories and have less items in each category.

I discovered (on my dedicated server) that having 30,000+ items in a single category made it so slow it was unusable. Having 2 categories with 15,000 items in each was frustratingly workable, and 3 categories with 10,000 in each was perfectly acceptable.

Oh, I should point out that the slowness only occurred while performing certain admin functions, the storefront itself remained usable even with a huge number of items in a single category.

If you think your slowness may be related to the same thing as mine was then it'll may be worth re-organising your store, but in all honesty, godaddy and zencart really aren't a very good combination, and with over 20,000 products you really should be considering something more suitable.

Cheers
Rod

Your All Products shows 5000+ products but your Category counts show less ...

You may wish to check your database to see if you have your tables for:
products
products_descriptions

categories
categories_description

products_to_categories

setup correctly with the right master_categories_id etc. and see if you can find where the imbalance is on the numbers ...

If you use Specials, Featured or Sales ... you will want to look at upgrading to v1.3.9a that was released today as this should also provide additional speed more specifically in the Admin but also in the Catalog ...

Along with what Rod suggested, you should try using the Query Cache module as it seems to greatly improve sites with products in the 5 digits and up range.