Generating Gift Certificate Codes

I need to generate 1000 new gift certificate codes for gift cards we'll be printing soon....the codes will be pre-printed on the cards so I need to generate the codes now so that I can give them to the printer.

We use PC to generate the codes so that we can easily make them usable on our online store as well as within our point of sale system.

The problem is that PC is taking approximately 85 seconds to generate just 10 codes, during which time our entire site is locked up.

Is this normal? Doesn't seem so to me, but maybe there's a lot more to generating unique codes than I'm aware of.

If there's no solution to make the default gift code generator faster and less processor intensive, what are the alternatives?

I've got several hundred PC-generated codes out there already and I'd like to keep the same 10-digit format.

We're running 3.11a on our live site, but I also just tested on our development site which is running 4.1a SP 1.

4.1a was faster, about 35 seconds to generate 10 codes...but it still locks up our entire site while generating the codes.

Since I need to generate 1,000 codes that means a completely unresponsive site for nearly an hour (if I'm doing my math correctly). ;)

Edited by rotokirby - 04-April-2011 at 4:03pm

Thanks for the top-notch service folks!

I must have had a bad or old file somewhere...replaced our files with the ones in the download and ZOOM! Everything working great now. :)