Site performance issues - really need advice

Hi,

Im looking for advice from those who have a little more zencart experience than me, i have placed two questions below. thanks!!

1. Here is my new website.

http://www.kukistudio.com/index.php

Its only got a small selection of dummy products in it but im not overly impressed with the site performance which I assume should be much quicker than it is. Here are some sample figures below. For those who know, do these figures seem high or are they the zencart average?

Parse Time: 1.421 - Number of Queries: 49 - Query Time: 0.5535213939209
Parse Time: 1.057 - Number of Queries: 186 - Query Time: 0.20855502105713
Parse Time: 1.039 - Number of Queries: 168 - Query Time: 0.1984028548584

2. I am currently hosted with easyspace. Would moving to a different hosting company (or at best a zencart supporting hosting company) improve the performance of my site?

Can you tell by the figures above where the largest bottleneck is and what steps should i take to improve performance?

Any advice would be very welcome.

Cheers
Cos

I would venture to say that the query time indicates that the mysql is not optimized for database robustness

Usually on a well tuned server the query time is one tenth the total

thanks for your reply.

Is it a case of my actual data causing this issue or perhaps the db schema or is it the case of the way mysql is configured and setup by Easyspace?

Depending on which of the above is true, is there anything i can do to optimise the database or do I have to move hosting provider?

I am guessing that a better query time would reduce the overall time it takes to load one of my pages?

Thanks
Cos

In testing the site just now, I found the load times to be acceptable. Both the "Parse Time" and "Query Time" were under 1 sec. which the rule of thumb to go by.

I suspect the Server you are on cannot handle load spikes at certain times of the day and thus, all sites on it will load slower than they should. If load time is the only problem you are having and the load time does not become too great, either of the Parse or Query time is still under 2 secs. then you might want to stay with your current Hoster. Moving Hosters is a big job and unless you know for sure that things will be better, you might end up going from the frying pan to the fire.

This site has:
Categories: 914
Products: 11,547
Attributes: 124,876

and the speed is:

Parse Time: 0.197 - Number of Queries: 432 - Query Time: 0.0757088212585 - Session Time: 3600
Parse Time: 0.282 - Number of Queries: 1006 - Query Time: 0.140767930939 - Session Time: 3600

That is a dedicated server ...

On another site that is on a shared server with:
Categories: 1,200
Products: 3,804
Attributes: 2,207

the speed is:

Parse Time: 0.209 - Number of Queries: 81 - Query Time: 0.0460027688293
Parse Time: 0.208 - Number of Queries: 1586 - Query Time: 0.0771779226685

Thanks for all replies. I am definetly keen to improve the speed of my site.

In the case you just mentioned of the site sitting on the shared server. Do you know which hosting solution this site sits on as it's stats are very impressive and a significant improvement of my site stats.

I would be happy to move hosting company if I first saw evidence of sites working well on their servers.

Any other recommendations of hosting solutions with examples of site performance would be welcome.

Thanks
Cos

Don't make moving an "if", you really need to.

A reverse IP domain lookup shows that this server is hosting 1,000 sites, including several in the "adult" genre that could lead to all content from the server being blocked by web filters, though easyspace have made them unavailable, they're still listed so damage could still be done.

Hugely loaded servers and reputation contamination from other users are everyday risks when using shared servers. If your business won't support at least a dedicated VPS, then I'd recommend that you investigate the Zen Cart "Certified Hosts" as their servers are usually geared to e-commerce and they're much more aware of the needs of (say) PCI-compliance and good server management than your typical pile-it-high-and-sell-it-cheap hosting company.

Thanks for the advice. I am considering moving my site across to one of the Zencart certified hosts.

Despite all these hosts being Zencart certified. Do you have a recommendation for any of those hosts in particular that standout in terms of performance and support?

Only somebody who uses all off them could properly answer that question, and why would anybody.

I recommend doing a site search and seeing what people say about them across the forum. If you Google their names with site:zen-cart.com as part of your search terms, you'll also see which are active in providing help in this forum.