jdl:
What's a reasonable response time for a store with 16 products?
On the server that the Zen Cart site runs on, I have a testing area set up that contains a fresh install with demo data. I've added a few products to test a few things, but right now I have 125 products. My parse time details on a first-load of the home page with an empty browser cache are:
Parse Time: 2.556 - Number of Queries: 876 - Query Time: 0.6845691
That's with all the demo products, all the sales, all the sideboxes and centerboxes active, etc.
So, that's running 876 queries in 0.68 seconds and taking 2.5 seconds to do the queries and cache the files for first hit... vs your server doing 290 queries in 1.23 seconds and 4.6 seconds to render the page.
If I then refresh the browser while things are cached, I get:```
Parse Time: 0.378 - Number of Queries: 877 - Query Time: 0.142696081207
Your shared GoDaddy hosting is NOT tuned to give performance to the database engine. You could have more fine-tuning control if you upgraded to a virtual/dedicated server with them, or simply use a host that takes eCommerce seriously and already has their servers tuned appropriately.
You're clearly on shared hosting on VERY busy servers. Your site will be faster when fewer people are hitting the same server, and slower when everyone wakes up and gets online again...
On a Zen Cart certified host, you won't find things as volatile. Trends will still exist, but a 1/128" rise is different than a 10" rise in unacceptable response times...
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