Zen Cart performance -- how to speed up

I've looked into the forum and some googling around. I did the basics like turning off cat counts and you know optimizing images and such.

Now I am looking into going deeper as I am still experiencing slowness. Are there any advanced techniques like mysql tuning, db/table indexing maybe some sort of caching mechanisms... Can you please suggest something?

Thank you!

:shocking:

How many category you have?

I have like 2 cats with 8 sub cats (total) and 180 products. I am on VPS with guaranteed RAM and CPU and I am running at about 4 seconds per page (as reported by the logger). That's really slow in my books.

Real slow. Im also on a vps, with 10 cats and more than 2k products, under 1s for me.

Go to admin->configuration->logging:
Turn this on: Display The Page Parse Time

Then check the parse time which is displayed at the footer of your page so we can look into the root of it.

I did a page load and then refreshed each page 2 more times.

I think the reason there is such difference between subsequent requests is because I am running APC (Alternative PHP Cache) which basically caches compiled PHP scripts in memory for some time.

Also I want to note that the VPS that I have is really good. I benchmarked it a bunch of times with WHT benchmarking tool and compared the results to others who posted to WHT forums and the resuts are outstanding. I use slhost.com for VPS.

I have a feeling the mysql is not well tuned.

So here are the log results:

Homepage:

Parse Time: 2.294 - Number of Queries: 156 - Query Time: 0.17747168765259
Parse Time: 0.510 - Number of Queries: 143 - Query Time: 0.086328308471679
Parse Time: 0.465 - Number of Queries: 142 - Query Time: 0.052989806533814

Category product listing (9 products per page):

Parse Time: 5.551 - Number of Queries: 490 - Query Time: 0.70459886512756
Parse Time: 0.348 - Number of Queries: 489 - Query Time: 0.17037248970032
Parse Time: 0.312 - Number of Queries: 490 - Query Time: 0.13764249580383

Product Page:

Parse Time: 0.351 - Number of Queries: 293 - Query Time: 0.073278934677124
Parse Time: 0.290 - Number of Queries: 293 - Query Time: 0.076099732574463
Parse Time: 0.290 - Number of Queries: 293 - Query Time: 0.074768521148682

As you can see, your sql query time is low and acceptable, so number of cat/product is not a problem.

Parse time is the culprit here, seems like it takes a bit of time. You may want to see if the page size is too bit, is there a server down-speed bottle neck at the mean time, etc...

Can you post the link to the site here?

I just ran the requests using wget on the same machine and the results are similar to what I posted, so it doesn't seem that the down-speed is a bottle neck. Besides, isn't parse time caclulated before the page goes to the user?

Homepage:

Parse Time: 0.360
Parse Time: 0.310
Parse Time: 0.250

Cat:

Parse Time: 0.304
Parse Time: 0.328
Parse Time: 0.316

Product:

Parse Time: 0.329
Parse Time: 0.318
Parse Time: 0.324

URL: http://www.normlclothing.com/

Change the IPS in your resolv.conf

I get from my side:

CAT
Parse Time: 0.456 - Number of Queries: 494 - Query Time: 0.13085649832153

PRODUCT
Parse Time: 0.424 - Number of Queries: 314 - Query Time: 0.08358398413086

Acceptable speed, and that's the first load time.

Also, if you use PHP cacher, the more visitors you have (and the more often they visit the site), the more effective the cache will be. This is from my own experience. ^^

Also, check Merlinpa1969's suggestion.

i forget what the resolv.conf is used for... Isn't it used by the system to do DNS lookups or something? Here are my entries:

search hunox.com
nameserver 206.123.117.195
nameserver 72.29.96.178
nameserver 72.29.98.35

We had this issue recently,
it was causing havoc with returns coming in from an outside source.

Contact your host for an alternative set of IPs to resolve to

I think these WERE provided by the host... I saw some people use OpenDNS as the values there... Supposedly OpenDNS is really fast.