Zencart and High CPU Usage?

Hello,

My host has shut our website down twice due to "high CPU usage". We are currently running version 1.2.6.

The host claims we used over 60% of the server capacity, claiming that the ZenCart script is what is causing the problem.

There are no excessive MySQL sessions left open, etc, which has been the source of this problem in the past for other users.

The host said, "While we do have a script install for those scripts the problem with your site is the number of times it runs and the number of concurrent running instances of the script."

I asked the host, "Is that due to a script error or is that just the way Zen Cart works? If I upgrade to the latest version would that solve the problem?" The host said, "Only if they optimized there code to use less cpu."

So I must ask, what does the Zen Cart community see as the problem? Could high traffic (we get about 100 unique visits a day to our site) cause the problem or could is Zen Cart's code not optimized to use less CPU power?

It might be time to move on to another hosting site that can manage e-commerce, php and MySQL better ...

I have many clients on shared servers with 1000s of unique hits a day and they have no issues ...

Perhaps look into our Certified Hosting sites and see if one of them could provide you will a more robust, yet affordable hosting service ...

100 unique hits isnt even busy,

alot of the carts on our servers get 1000's of hits a day and a few get close to 100,000 unique hits a day.

I am running seven Zen-Carts, about a dozen OSC sites, nine Joomla CMS sites, a couple of Wordpress sites, and one X-cart off of my server without even putting a strain on the machine.

I think I would look for a different host.

I know I like seeing these kinda numbers

top - 18:01:39 up 45 days,  4:32,  2 users,  load average: 0.22, 0.13, 0.10
Tasks: 134 total,   1 running, 133 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu0  :  0.0% us,  1.0% sy, 12.0% ni, 86.3% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.7% si
Cpu1  :  0.0% us,  0.3% sy,  0.7% ni, 99.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Cpu2  :  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 99.7% id,  0.3% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Cpu3  :  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si

After 6 days of massive CPU usage and hardly no traffic on my website, I found the problem.
Googlebot was on my website clicking every second or two which meant that in a 24 hour period clicking on my website, it was clicking over 80,000 clicks a day.
I blocked the IP address of googlebot and everything is back to normal.