Using ProductCart - Database Search speed

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Database Search speed

Printed From: ProductCart E-Commerce Solutions
Category: ProductCart
Forum Name: Using ProductCart
Forum Description: Running your store with ProductCart
URL: https://forum.productcart.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=1601
Printed Date: 23-November-2024 at 5:23pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: Database Search speed

Posted By: jwerner
Subject: Database Search speed
Date Posted: 06-May-2008 at 5:16pm

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

Replies:

Posted By: Hamish
Date Posted: 06-May-2008 at 5:21pm

Hi,
Take a look at this thread :
http://www.earlyimpact.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1585&PID=4921#4921 - http://www.earlyimpact.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1585&PID=4921#4921
Early Impact have some new code which you can ask for access to as beta & some others are using Google.

Posted By: CoffeeShop
Date Posted: 07-May-2008 at 2:40am

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.

Posted By: The internets
Date Posted: 08-May-2008 at 2:38pm

From the manual:

Turn search and product preview features ON/OFF (AJAX)
o: ProductCart v3 contains advanced interface elements that take advantage of a set of technologies that have been
defined as AJAX. If you are interested in learning more about AJAX, Wikipedia has agood section on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX Among the AJAX-enhanced components you will find a search preview feature (which
or
siting the product details page – see example above), and others.
e increases when using AJAX, it is strongly
you do – you
hen the feature is turned ON vs. OFF to
tells you how many results will be returned before you perform the search), a product preview feature (which provides product details when you mouse over a product name thumbnail, without vi
Because the number of calls to the databas
recommended that you only use this feature when your store is powered by a MS SQL database. If you are using MS Access, you should not use this feature or – if
should regularly check your store for any performance issues. In addition, you should try disabling this feature if you are experiencing performance issues, regardless of the database use: compare the store performance w
understand whether it negatively impacts performance on your store.

Posted By: slinc
Date Posted: 13-May-2008 at 9:40pm

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.

Posted By: CoffeeShop
Date Posted: 13-May-2008 at 10:29pm

Slightly off-topic, but I like to have an idea at what point does the database search feature gets really worked down? I think this would be helpful for those who will be expanding their stores soon.

slinc and jwerner if I may ask:

- # of products on your store
- hosting features (if shared, and if dedicated some specs of your machine/ maybe before machine upgrade, etc?)
- before you realized you need to work on the 'upgrade'/ expanded or outsourced search any slowdown when customers accessing your website simply by browsing from main page to checkout without doing any search?

Thanks! Just like to have an idea from someone who hopes my store would reach your volume soon :).

Posted By: Matt
Date Posted: 14-May-2008 at 11:15am

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.

Posted By: slinc
Date Posted: 14-May-2008 at 11:32am

Hey Matt,

We did these changes back in February 2007 so I can not go back and review in details. But at the time I remember doing test with and without the code in. It was clear at the time that it was better just to remove it. This I believe was the first release of the V3. It wasn't a big deal we just commented out the include files we didn't want to load. As with any speed issues it depends on the server and the other content elements on the page.

If I remember correctly we also removed some .js code that allowed for ordering from the category page which helped a little. We didn't need it at the time and wanted to clean up everything that wasn't needed.

We are very happy with our Product Cart installation and have done A LOT of customizations to make it fit our needs.

Posted By: slinc
Date Posted: 15-May-2008 at 8:37am

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.