Beyond imaginable slow site

Hi all,

This is one of my first questions here, so please be kind, as I seem to have read a lot flaming for noobs.

first off, we are currently running OSC and are moving to Zen (at least unless I can convince my partner not to with the current performance problems). First off, the entire new zen site we created is slow, abysmally slow. Slow beyond comprehension. I have checked table indexes... all good there. I have checked the parse times... database is bad on products with a lot of options/attributes, but the total parse time is always bad the general rule is 5 to 15 seconds. Some are as bad as 15-25 seconds or more with the database issues.

It seems to surround the number of attributes/options. One particularly poor performing product takes 25 seconds to parse with >20 seconds on the database with about 8000 queries. That's insane, if you ask me. The identical product with the same options/attributes on OSC MS2.2 takes less than 1 second to load (including page parse times, download and everything) Someone please tell me what the heck is going on here. This is the same server, same hosting, everything, just different subdomain.

I know there seem to be some hosting snobs out there... we are using GoDaddy premium shared hosting, so please be kind to us.

We also paid a designer to design a great template for Zen for us. We tested it on their site (which had reasonable performance), so we are in this project some money, and quite a bit of time and effort. We just moved over to our hosting about a few days ago.

I am seriously afraid that the long page generation times will make it so that we will have to abandon the implementation, or at least move it out several months until we fix this problem. I can't imagine our customers sticking around to look at products every 1 minute. I haven't a clue as to what would fix this problem. I'll admit, I haven't delved deep into the inner workings of the Zen engine yet, but I find it hard to understand how nearly identical pages in OSC and Zen have such varied response times. Is there really that much system/database overhead generated by products' attributes? Is there any way to reduce it?

BTW, I noticed that our template (as delivered by the designer) has nearly every page (I think this is an override) Is that going to affect performance as well?

Thanks, and please be kind.

... I seem to have read a lot flaming for noobs.

I know there seem to be some hosting snobs out there....

I hope you'll allow me a second to respond to both of these statements.

I've been around here more than three years, and have never seen any response to a noob I'd consider 'flaming'.

I have seen a lot of newcomers post questions when it's obvious that they haven't checked the FAQ and tutorials, or even searched the forums, and who get angry when the response they receive is a link to the answer in those same forums.

The response to questions about GoDaddy hosting isn't snobbery - it's usually reasoned criticism based on a lot of experience, much of it documented in these forums.

That said, my search for 'slow' in the forums revealed a lot of threads reporting the same problem you're having, and some possilble remedies. It looks like it's possible that your Zencart installation and your database might be on different servers, which could be responsible for the difference between Zen and OSC.

Some mods will also slow down your cart. You didn't mention which, if any, you have installed.

The list of mods is extensive:

FUAL Slimbox
Ty Package Tracker
Ultimate SEO URLs
Image Handler
Database Backup
Email Archive Manager
(have also about 15 define_pages additional)

The performance problem is most notable on product pages where parse times are regularly 3 to 5 seconds longer than the database time. Most products have 5+ attributes since everything is customized. Most products have more than 1000 queries which is contributing to the problem.

Basically, database time is a problem on the product pages, but parse time is bad everywhere, all the time (no difference day or night, high volume or not)

I talked with the host also last night and they don't see a performance problem that they can see on the server itself.

Basically, GoDaddy is good with OSC, Zen is okay on other hosts, but Zen + GoDaddy seems to be a non-starter. Is that what I am to expect? What about other hosts? I am trying to figure out if this is a host problem, or if it is a general Zen problem, as each of them has different solutions for us.

I'll let smarter heads than mine (DrByte?) figure out the exact problem, but the fact that OSC works OK and Zen doesn't is an important clue, but it's also important that Zencart, including those carts with as many products/attributes as yours, work fine with many hosts, including GoDaddy.

It seems to me that the problem lies with Zencart's interaction with your host.

My solution to this, were it me, would be to install Zencart, with the same mods, on another host (many hosts will allow month-to-month accounts) and see if the problem persists. I can recommend my host if you want to PM me.

While you are usingthe same products and the same attributes between the 2 carts they are in noway the same....

ZC is alot more database intensive, and requires a good setup to run,
that said there are shops out there that are running 5 6 and 10 thousand queries in a second or 2 max......

thats parse and query time.......
Overloaded servers also play part in the overall speed,
I am not going to bash Godaddy, I will say that if you do a quick search for godaddy on these forums you will see that they have alot of bad press,
some of its speed, some of it is the lack of certain ports being open,

a few things you can do to help,
turn OFF category counts,
Turn OFF any sideboxes or feature boxes that are not mission critical.
in the admin turn ON G-zip..... see if these things help you out,

and if you would like to test this setup on a seperate server that is tuned for ZC let me know, we will setup a test account for you to load and test...

Thanks stevesh. If anyone wants to look at the test site it is: test.babyemijewelry.com

Our osc version is on the main www site /catalog.

I can't for the life of me understand how this is so slow.

Ouch that is slow

This is one site that I was refering to
http://www.carbonless.net/carbcart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=43_234_184_224&products_id=731
Parse Time: 0.884 - Number of Queries: 3909 - Query Time: 0.561997062241

as compared to

http://test.babyemijewelry.com/copper-heart-necklace-p-236.html
Parse Time: 6.801 - Number of Queries: 1765 - Query Time: 4.11719667848

so as you can see, its not so much the cart but the server setup

Looks like you may have taken some of merlin's advice - no matter where I go on your site, parse times are between .2 and .9 seconds. IE7.

The Zencart installation does seem a little slower than the OSC pages, but it's not 'I can't wait, I'm out of here' slow.

Hi All,

Merlin, thanks for the info. Unfortunately, despite what Steve is seeing, I am still seeing long long parse times. The shortest I could find was about 1.5 seconds, and that was on a very small page with about 100 queries. (one of the info pages). A notoriously bad one is here:
http://test.babyemijewelry.com/generations-bracelet-grandma-p-68.html
with the following stats:
Parse Time: 19.090 - Number of Queries: 7992 - Query Time: 16.2287690209
(that's at 9:00PM PST)

I checked, and indeed, I have gzip compression enabled (was pretty sure but checked anyway), and do not have the category counts on. There are a number of sideboxes that the designer created, but they are all inactive (do you think that will slow it down considerably?)

As far as the offer to try out a test host, we would definitely consider it if we could test it out. I know my partner and I would be very open to moving since we already have so much invested in the system already.

Thanks to both of you guys... seems like it's time to start interviewing hosts as fast as possible... with that said, how long would I expect it to take to transfer a domain (not the hosting & files & everything, just transfer the domain) minutes, hours, days, weeks? I have no experience doing that, so anyone with experience with moving off GoDaddy would be great.

to actually transfer domain names is a few days however you wouldnt have to transfer the domainname if you choose to move3 sites you can just repoint where the domainname points