The last two days, my site has ran slow for about 3 hours. I get stats like:

Parse Time: 25.027 - Number of Queries: 248 - Query Time: 24.2209453734

Parse Time: 29.655 - Number of Queries: 240 - Query Time: 26.4118395432

And those are good times.

My queries are low compared to what I've read on the forum. Anyone have suggestions on where to look? I only had 14,000 rows in my database. Thanks.

(not sure where to put this thread)

Looks like you need a new host

I am using one of the certified hosts. Why do I need to leave one of zen carts certified hosts?

Look in the Tools ... Server Info ... what does the line that starts with:
Server Up Time:

read for you?

Do you have an URL that we could perhaps peek at to see if we can locate what might be the slow down?

url is woodstarproducts.com.

that line says: Server Up Time: 08:46:44 up 20 days, 13:02, 5 users, load average: 51.28, 56.60, 67.04

Thanks for looking into this.

just trying to give more details, I have a tmp file thats called mySQL_slow_queries. The file sizes are pretty large for this morning up to 1 MB.

Inputs look like this:

Tue Jan 18 08:00:54 2011

Query_time: 2.349588 Lock_time: 0.000100 Rows_sent: 0 Rows_examined: 1

use mydatabase_name;
update counter set counter = '3929797'

There are hundreds of similar but different entries. Not sure if this helps.

You need to speak to your Hosting provider and tell them that the server load is way high and that they need to address this problem or move you to a server that is not overloaded ...

Can I ask what range the server load should be?

I have 160 people on line at the moment and think this setting is a little high:
load average: 0.87, 1.44, 1.68

I believe it has to be done by PMs but can some of you give me suggestions on a reliable host for a small to medium size zen cart store? Please send some PMs my way.

By the way, now my site stats are (without making any changes to script like they suggested):

Parse Time: 0.247 - Number of Queries: 249 - Query Time: 0.0711066473236

Tomorrow i am sure it will be slow again. It has to be on their end even though they are not admitting to it.

You can check in the Tools ... Server Info ... and should see if the Server up time is short, that they may have just need to restart the server to fix this issue ...

Keep an eye on your speed and if it happens again, suggest to them that you need to be moved to a less over loaded server ...

Not trying to hijack the thread, but I am having very similar issues that the OP is having, along with similar parse times, queries and query times. I checked Tools>Server Up Time and mine says:

Server Up Time: Unchecked

Does anyone know what that may indicate?

Unchecked probably means that they do not allow polling this data

Well, I made the switch to a new host, everything seems to be up and running and it is a night and day difference with speed. It is so lightning quick to compared to what I had. I have to pay $10 bucks more a month (instead of $7, its $17). The server load is less than 1.0 (haven't seen it over that yet) and my other stats for my home page are:

Parse Time: 0.130 - Number of Queries: 189 - Query Time: 0.0234079981079

My suggestion that worked for me at least, switch hosts! It wasn't my script or all these excuses that they were trying to excuse me of, they just couldn't handle a larger store and their server's were overloaded.