slow search on site

Hello fellow Zen Cart bloggers,

Need help if any one can answer this, how do you speed up the search bar? My search on the site takes for ever, about 20 seconds. We are on version V1.3.9D. Our company has over 200,000 products up. We are being hosted by Go Daddy on an apache server. We spent a bit recently on developing and are still having trouble with the general search. I am not sure if it is the server or our site. I would like to know the problem and get it addressed before we come back into our season.(We are a motorcycle shop)
Here is a link to our site:
http://www.bikertrends.com/
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Dorothy Smith

Are you using a dedicated server with boat loads of CPU and RAM ?

No, not dedicated, basic plan with Go Dadday on an apache server. We have about 500 people on our site at any given time but those are mostly bots, I have been thinking it was our server but I do not want to switch with out knowing that will cure the issue. Also I have asked Go Daddy before and they said we do not use a lot of bandwidth that we are allowed.

Dorothy Smith

200,000 products is a huge quantity, in the range of what I have read posts about top-notch developers doing special configurations and optimizations for. If you are not expert in these optimizations, you may want to hire someone who is. And if you do not have extra-fast server resources a search that has to consider hundreds of thousands of products could easily get bogged down. I suggest that godaddy is not an appropriate host for a site with serious handling needs.

Our company has a few plugins that optimize it for us that has been working well, our developer is good and he has some experience with Zen Cart, it was a little bit slower and we have made vast improvements, if you click from goggle to our site it is lightning fast, search by category is quick, just our search bar search is very slow. Maybe there are other optimizers that will speed up the search.(sql?) Go Daddys dedicated server from what they say is suppose to be very good, some of there reps say it would be a good switch others say its over kill unless you have 1,000 or more customers on your site at one time. Any other good hosting options? Also I want to make sure that helps before signing a contract and boosting the server cost that much.

I have moved a dedicated server on GoDaddy to another new dedicated server with GoDaddy with 4+ times the power and it completely solved the slowness backup we experienced in the past. Very happy with the changeover, the server power and the added expense was made back in sales.

IMHO, GoDaddy's dedicated servers are still GoDaddy's servers and can't be compared to most other (proper) dedicated servers. I've had a situation where I moved a client's site from GD's dedicated to my VPS and the site showed incredible improvement...

As for what their reps are saying... Oh c'mon, think about it... No need to comment that at all... :smile:

Now, for your problem - if it's just the search bar, you might wanna try disabling it to search in descriptions. It's not the same thing to search in product names and to search in both product names and description fields. With the amount of products you currently have, this means a lot of server resources (primarily RAM) and it definitely does matter if you're having 5 visitors online or 500...

But, probably your best option would be to go for cloud. Can you afford Rackspace? It might cost a bit more, but as twitchtoo said, it will pay back on it's own - shoppers literally require fast sites and are more likely to spend their money on a fast site rather than with a shop where they can take their dog for a walk while a page is being loaded... :wink:

Most of the part numbers are in the title, so if there is a way to deactivate it in the description I will try that. I have heard Rackspace was very good. I will also look at Go Daddy's premium plans.(Our listings come up very high on Goggle searches, most are on top of the first page. Will switching effect our page ranking negatively?) Thank you guys alot! I was thinking we definitely needed to upgrade our server but wanted to make sure. Much appreciated. Our company will be switching servers this coming month. Thank you again.

Dorothy Smith

Don't kid yourself with premium plans... It's still GoDaddy's servers... Just keep that in mind.

Transfers should not have any affect on your rankings, as long as it's an improvement. If you transfer to a bad host, get a bad IP address and actually slow your site down (degrade), of course that would affect your rankings. But, if you upgrade to a better host, you're only risking even better search engine results. I'd take that kind of risk anytime. :wink:

If you want to disable search in description in the header bar, try the following: find your includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE/sideboxes/tpl_search_header.php and change

$content .= zen_draw_hidden_field('search_in_description', '1') . zen_hide_session_id();

to

$content .= zen_draw_hidden_field('search_in_description', '0') . zen_hide_session_id();

Of course, if the file isn't there, it means you don't have an override so copy the file from template_default directory to your template's directory.

This is all under the assumption your files haven't been modified and the header search bar wasn't hard coded or in any other way altered.

To test if you actually did something, try searching for a term that can only be found in your product descriptions - if no matches are found, it means you disabled searching in description.