Product Pages Painfully Slow

DrByte:

Switching to another unnecessarily expensive plan with your current host involves the same steps technically as would a move to another host. You still have to switch servers in either case.
https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=100
Better to be putting the effort into being with a more reliable host than to waste it on the existing one.

Very true. Cool - I appreciate the honest advice and will update on how this works. So recommended web hosts...same as what is listed here or are there others SuperZenners prefer? http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=infopages&pages_id=10

Thanks again SO much for all of your help everybody!

Molly

Here is an update. Shocker: you all were right...it does seem it was the host causing slow parse times. I switched from GoDaddy to Pro-Webs.net and the site is super speedy despite having 25,000 products on it. Thank you Melanie and all others who helped me understand the issue!

Thanks again,
Molly

Hi Molly

I'm no genius, but I have had similar problems to the one you describe and seen a radical, immediate improvement without changing hosts. In fact, I'm using just a tenth of a very cheap hosting package. I was occasionally getting problems with the

1062 Duplicate entry 'zc_56bef17b17fbeb6627441de26659411d' for key 1
in:
[db_cache table]

error message coming up far too often. When the site was 'working' without that error displaying, it was painfully slow and the Product pages were often particularly slow (30 seconds...). There are theories as to why this 1062 error surfaces, but they all seem linked to having a very slow response (perhaps a second query is coming in before the first one has returned - which sort of implies that the queries are not being returned quickly?). I'm running 1.3.9h on what is a 11S hosting server.
Solution? I went back to running with SQL Cache Method: None.

See http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=69700

No cache, so no duplicated items in the cache.
There is more than one piece of advice out there advising caching; I'd definitely treat it with caution. Perhaps I was running some form of corrupted cache, but perhaps I wasn't. My site is absolutely fine now. :yes:

Indeed that's one main reason why the default is set to None in the first place.

Another thing to consider is ensuring that your /cache/ folder isn't also full of log files. Those log files are indicators of ongoing PHP errors, which you should fix to ensure your site is operating properly, and then delete so that they don't slow down the system. The logs do need to be generated, and you do need to review them and take corrective action.

There are a number of additional performance tuning tips available if you look in the Tutorials/FAQs knowledgebase, including this one: https://www.zen-cart.com/tutorials/index.php?article=287