Painfully Slow - Windows 2008 IIS7 FastCGI

We have a small web farm running Windows 2008 Server and IIS7. The servers are setup in shared configuration mode, which means that they each share the same configuration file for ease of management. They also both share the same UNC path based data folders for each of the websites.

We recently had a request from a customer to use ZenCart with phpMyAdmin and a MySQL server. We installed and configured the MySQL server and everything went fine. We installed phpMyAdmin and got that running successfully and it isn't too bad. It has some rendering issues in IE browswers, but it sems to work.

Then, we copied the ZenCart 1.3.9f files to the website and began the installer. I fixed all of the various issues that the installed warned me about except the Current SQL Cache folder. That one seemed to be optional. (Tell me otherwise please).

After installation/configuration, the customer called and complained that it was painfully slow. I tried it and it is very slow. We thought it might be a UNC path problem, so we tried moving the files to each web server manually and changing the website to point to the local copy, but that didn't help.

I'm not even sure where to start. I could try to start turning modules and parts off, but I don't want to limit the features just to fix the speed. I have no idea how to test performance at each step of the process either. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks - Jon

This is really a question of server configuration a best asked at some where like
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

How so? PHP works fine for other sites and it isn't slow as far as i can tell. And the zen install doesn't seem to be so bad with speed. It's just the actual shopping cart itself.

Without seeing the site itself and having you turn on Display Page Parse Times under Admin->Configuration->Logging, it's hard to tell you exactly what's wrong.
It's likely that your distributed server farm has some performance and/or latency problems when accessing the database. That's a common problem in "farms" and "cloud" configurations when using database-driven sites.