My Zen Cart REALLY slow but only occasionally!

Hi all,

I have just set up my first Zan Cart this week and overall I am pleased with it. But I am having some issues with speed. 80% of the time it is fine - parse and query times all well below 1 second. But about 20% of the time it is the exact opposite. I click on something and wait forever (after 45 seconds or so I stop my browser and try again) or at best I get parse times of 5-15 seconds. Then after awhile it goes back to being zippy again!

I only have 11 items in my store (split over 6 categories) and heavy processing features like who's online etc are turned off. I guess I should also mention that when I get the longer parse times, the query times are still low, so I don't think it is the MySQL.

Do I need to take this up with my host (MacHighway) or is there something in Zen Cart that I'm not doing right? There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, like it's not certain links or areas that are always slow. Typically EVERYTHING is slow for some period of time and then magically EVERYTHING will pick up speed again and work fine.

Any tips much appreciated. Site is:
http://www.harmonyyogaannarbor.com/zencart if anyone wants to test for me!

Karen :smile:

Kind of sounds like a periodically overloaded server, which would be your host's responsibility.

It's probably your host. When I first installed my zenCart shop, it was extremely slow... after weeks of trying to trouble shoot or get help from my host company, I finally switched over to host Monster. What a difference.

I have contacted my host and they are looking into it, but their initial response said that the server where my site resides is at less than 50% capacity and the MySQL server is at only about 20% capacity. So it certainly doesn't seem like that should cause overload. My cart is small - 11 items in 5 categories so I can't imagine it places much of a demand on server resources either.

I guess I will see what my host can do, and maybe in the meantime keep track of the times it is happening. When it is running fast everything is great and I'm so happy! Just once in awhile it grinds to almost a halt with Parse times of 10+ seconds for no apparent reason. Query times are always fast.

If anyone has any other ideas let me know. Thanks!

Karen

What shipping modules do you have installed?

It might not solve your problem, but will certainly help, and is just good practice; try enabling GZip compression.

My site has no shipping for any products. (The "products" are classes that people are registering/paying for).

I did enable gzip compression and that didn't seem to make any difference.

I also have no product images on this site and only 11 products so really there is no reason it should be slow!

My host has moved the site to another server which is better tuned to handle a complex script like Zen Cart. So far it seems to be doing A LOT better.

There are still times, though, where the status bar in my browser will get about halfway, then hang out for 20 seconds, and then complete. Once the page is complete, the Parse and Query times are both always under a second. I wonder what sometimes causes the browser to hang in the middle like that? (This happens not only to me but to another person I've had testing...)

Anyway moving to another server has for the most part solved the original problem.

I have the same issues with GoDaddy. It seems that sometimes the site is smokin fast and other times pages time out and don't load at all. Although when the site is slow I notice that the HTML pages still load fast, the slowdown only occurs on the Zen Cart part of my site. I have narrowed it down to a problem with the database, well not actually WITH the database. Seems that the website is located on one server and the database on another server. When my site is slow is most likely when the shared database server utilization is high. Only one person at GoDaddy agrees with me but everyone else there says it's a problem with my scripting ..... hello????? wouldn't it be slow ALL the time then???
Basically GoDaddy doesn't want to help and I am contemplating hosting my own site or switching to another hosting company.
By testing the server your site is on most likely wont show any problems, your hosting company will have to test the server your database is on.
Hope this helps.

Steve

Basically GoDaddy doesn't want to help and I am contemplating hosting my own site or switching to another hosting company.

I would suggest you do a search of the forum for your host - I believe you find there are many similar problems and others. Look at using a Zen Cart Certified host. Link at the top of the page.

ehtats:

I have the same issues with GoDaddy. It seems that sometimes the site is smokin fast and other times pages time out and don't load at all. Although when the site is slow I notice that the HTML pages still load fast, the slowdown only occurs on the Zen Cart part of my site. I have narrowed it down to a problem with the database, well not actually WITH the database. Seems that the website is located on one server and the database on another server. When my site is slow is most likely when the shared database server utilization is high. Only one person at GoDaddy agrees with me but everyone else there says it's a problem with my scripting ..... hello????? wouldn't it be slow ALL the time then???
Basically GoDaddy doesn't want to help and I am contemplating hosting my own site or switching to another hosting company.

That is a classic problem with shared hosting on overloaded servers by hosting companies whose sole goal is to line their pockets rather than to provide excellent service.

As Kim said, researching your host is an important step. Using a certified host generally results in fewer headaches.