https://forum.productcart.com/ Copyright (c) 2006-2013 Web Wiz Forums - All Rights Reserved. Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:39:21 +0000 Wed, 03 May 2006 19:47:58 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Web Wiz Forums 12.04 360 https://forum.productcart.com/RSS_post_feed.asp?TID=183 https://forum.productcart.com/forum_images/pc_logo_50.png https://forum.productcart.com/ https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post543.html#543 Author: geoff
Subject: 183
Posted: 03-May-2006 at 7:47pm

Dean
Thanks that makes alot of sense. The URL to the utilities are very useful. You don't know of any free utilities that you can run to determine the download speed  from the host?

The reason I was concerned in this direction is that an uncached viewprd call is at times taking 7+sec and I am not really sure why. I'll try and track the reoccurance to make sure I am correctly identifying a problem.

I am probably going to seek a dedicated server for the perceived security benefit. If anyone has a comment on that I would be interested. Also is anyone using the advanced security ProductCart utility? My experience has not been favorable with occasional incompatability on Firefox (at least in my hands) and again a responsiveness hit. Maybe some else has other experience or has built their own character recognition additional layer?
Geoff
]]> Wed, 03 May 2006 19:47:58 +0000 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post543.html#543 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post542.html#542 Author: Dean
Subject: 183
Posted: 03-May-2006 at 12:01am

Here's a way to isolate the problem to your host or your ISP.  Create a web page that downloads a big 50 to 100K graphic image.  Call it test.htm or something.  Its just for you to test the speed of your host.  This will eliminate any variables around the speed of the database.  Clear your browser cache and time how long it takes to down load the image. 

Next run the speed tests at these two sites and note the speeds you get.  They'll be a bit different, but the download speeds should be close.
http://meter.mstarmetro.net/
http://2wire.com/?p=154

Do this several times during the day, when things are running fast and slow.  If the independant network speed tests stay about the same but the speed of the downloaded image varies you know the problem is with your host.  If the speed tests slow down you know the problem is with your ISP.  If everything stays the same you know the problem is with the database.

Dean

]]> Wed, 03 May 2006 00:01:59 +0000 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post542.html#542 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post539.html#539 Author: thrion
Subject: 183
Posted: 01-May-2006 at 10:59pm

Well, there are a bunch of things you can do to test this out.

First off, try your site from someplace else...get friends to log on, co-workers, go to the public library...any place you can and see if you see differences in the speed of your site.

Next, you should compare your observed speed issues with your web logs...are you getting slammed with customers when the site seems slow?  If not, then the shared server you are on could be an issue.

It also could be your cable modem...I have several friends who use cabel who say that from 6 - 9 in the evening, their speed goes down when everyone else in the area with cable starts getting online.

Try and narrow down your problem with easy things first, jumping to your own server is expensive if you don't need to do it.
]]> Mon, 01 May 2006 22:59:16 +0000 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post539.html#539 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post537.html#537 Author: geoff
Subject: 183
Posted: 01-May-2006 at 6:36pm

Dean/Thrion

Thanks for your comments. I find it very difficult to determine whether it is my hosting company or my cable provider that causes the variability in page load time that I seem to experience.

With an uncached browser, load time might vary from 0.5s in the day to upto 20s in the evening for the same page. Database calls don't seem to ever be significant except when trying to run productcart reports.


]]> Mon, 01 May 2006 18:36:08 +0000 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post537.html#537 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post536.html#536 Author: Dean
Subject: 183
Posted: 01-May-2006 at 3:44pm

Everything thrion said, especially the quality of your data center.  I've had some amazingly bad luck with hosts, but my last move made a HUGE!!!! improvement in my customers experience.  In my experience its not nessarily the speed of the database that isthe bottle neck, but the size and amount of graphics on your pages. When we first opened our site we had these really cool graphics thatwould change each time the user clicked on an new item.  We gotcomplaints that our site was slow, and in looking at it we decided forless cool in exchange for more speed.

We curently have thousands of customers and orders in our database and other than it is growning in size day by day there are no problems I can see.  The size of your database is going to be dependant on many  variables, but disk space is cheap so setup a 100 meg database and forget about it.  Mine is about 15 meg right now with about 100 products.

Regarding concurrent users we put ProductCart and our host to the test everytime we have a sale.  ProductCart seems to be able to handle the load.  But, beware if you are selling items with high demand and limited availablity there is a "limitation" in ALL of the readily available shopping carts when dealing with user contention.  If like us, you have 100 items and 500 customers you will over sell your stock, unless you follow the manual procedures we've developed.  The problem is a tricky one and since 99.999% of the sites don't have this issue it is understandable that none of the cart vendors I know of have addressed the issue. 
]]> Mon, 01 May 2006 15:44:35 +0000 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post536.html#536 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post508.html#508 Author: thrion
Subject: 183
Posted: 26-April-2006 at 1:11pm

I think a lot of that has to do with the server you are on, how you have your database set up, and the quality of your datacenter.
]]> Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:11:07 +0000 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post508.html#508 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post506.html#506 Author: geoff
Subject: 183
Posted: 25-April-2006 at 7:00am

I was wondering if people with experience of using ProductCart could comment on the performance of ProductCart (in terms of speed to customers and order processing to Webmaster) changes due to both size of site (number of products), number of concurrent users, and ongoing administration changes that tends to make the shopping cart progressively larger.

I am most interested in MS SQL based systems on Windows 2003 server, but would like to hear and learn from your experience.
]]> Tue, 25 Apr 2006 07:00:55 +0000 https://forum.productcart.com/scalability-of-productcart_topic183_post506.html#506