Scalability of ProductCart

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.

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 is the bottle neck, but the size and amount of graphics on your pages.  When we first opened our site we had these really cool graphics that would change each time the user clicked on an new item.  We got complaints that our site was slow, and in looking at it we decided for less 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. 

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.

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