Database Search speed

Hello everyone.  We are currently working through some startup processes for the PC software, and love it so far.  Everything works quite fine, except for one thing.  The "search" box times out pretty much every time.  We have about 7000 total products and subproducts (clothing, so we get lots of combos of size and color).  Actual number of primary products is about 150. 

Currently everything runs a little slow, but tolerable.  The search function/box simply does not work, it times out almost every time.   Is there any database functions that can be added, or control panel processes that should be looked at?  We used the import function for about 130 of the 150 products if that makes any difference.  I noticed limited indexing on the DB tables.  Using SQL Server, not Access. 

Any tips or tricks to go through?

Jason Werner

Sorry if this won't mean much to you. But I read somewhere (can't remember if it is in the forums or knowledge base) that you can make slight modifications in the code to 'turn off' the AJAX search.

On the search page, by default PC will give you something like "Your search will return x results(s)." - BEFORE you clicking on the 'Continue' button. I think this tends to slow the system down so by turning it off it might help.

Also read from the reply above this that PC is testing out new files to aid search speed results.

We replaced the ProductCart search with a search product from Nextopia.com. We have been using them for a couple years now and their advanced search is very robust, fast and reasonably priced compared to other advanced search products. They also did the integration with ProductCart for very little money. You can be up and running in a few hours. One good thing about this is that the search is actually performed on nextopia servers and the results are delivered to our site. Therefore, our server doesn't have to take the load of these searches. We also get features like stop words, filtering of results, etc.

Nextopia offers a free demo of their search product on their website you can signup for and try on your site.

On the topic of AJAX, we have removed pretty much all of this from our Product Cart website for performance issues. Simply turning off AJAX wasn't enough, we actually needed to remove the included javascript files that were downloading even if AJAX wasn't used. This had a very noticeable performance improvement for us. If you use Firefox download the Firebug add-on and you will see the impact all this extra code has on performance. Hope this helps.

Hi slinc,

In our Firebug tests the AJAX .js file is less than 1 kb.  The first time you load the page it takes 79 milliseconds.  The browser then caches the .js file and all subsequent loads take 39 milliseconds.  In both cases the size and loading of the AJAX is insignificant.  What, specifically, are the performance issues you referring to in your message? We are happy to take a look.

 

Hi CoffeShop,

We have found the search works at acceptable speeds (around 3 – 4 seconds) with a few thousand products.  It was still quite fast with 5,000 products.  The latest search files (still in Beta) perform at acceptable speeds at 24,000 products.  Just keep in mind each store is different and there are several factors that contribute to search speed (e.g. computer hardware, database type, and number of categories).  Our performance tests were performed on what could be considered average shared hosting conditions… because this is what the majority of people are using today.    

Coffeshop,

Our decision to outsource our search was more for features than for speed. Nextopia was fairly inexpensive and had many advanced search features. We only have about 2,000 products.