Using ProductCart - Site is very slow

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Site is very slow

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=4175
Printed Date: 04-March-2025 at 1:10pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: Site is very slow

Posted By: dccreatives
Subject: Site is very slow
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 12:34pm

I have a site that is supposed to go live this week. I keep timing out when accessing the database to find a product and other database calls.

I contacted the hosting company who said that this is not their issue, as the server that it is on, is nearly empty and aside from my site, the performance is much quicker on other sites calling the database.

They suggest that this is a software coding issue. Can someone please let me know what I can do to improve the speed.

Site is http://www.kennethreeve.com/store/pc - www.kennethreeve.com/store/pc .

Thanks.

Replies:

Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 12:41pm

It definitely seems slow. A page like the following one should be loading extremely fast:

http://www.kennethreeve.com/store/pc/Sizing-Tips-d5.htm - http://www.kennethreeve.com/store/pc/Sizing-Tips-d5.htm

You might want to open a support ticket so that we can take a quick look at your header.asp/footer.asp code and see if we can spot any red flags.

From a first look, though, this does seem an issue that is probably hosting-related. For example, it could be a particularly slow shared MS SQL server. We see this happen all the time.

Who is the hosting provider?
Have you hosted other stores in the same hosting environment? If so, can you check the database connection string to see if the other stores are connecting to the same SQL server or not?

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The ProductCart Team

Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software

Posted By: katharina
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 12:42pm

I'm not a pro, but had similar problem with a past provider. I finally had it with them after they screwed up my database. BTW that was webhost4life.com.
I've contacted www.joltdigital.com after getting the runaround routine, while my store had been down for 2 days. Best call ever. They transfered the entire site, set up the sever and database connection for me free of charge! They are very familiar with PC and don't give you the run around. I'm sure there are some other good hosts out there that specialize on PC.

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Katharina
*******************
www.GermanPlaza.com
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Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 12:45pm

I agree that it appears to be very slow. Which host is this? It's running MSSQL, correct? I wonder if they can push the databse over to another SQL server just to eliminate that as a possiblity?

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GreyBeard Design Group

Certified ProductCart Developer

Web Design/Development/Hosting

http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code |

Posted By: dccreatives
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 12:53pm

The hosting provider is Crystal Tech - and early impact recommended them. We tried moving to a new database server and the tech guy said it was a new and nearly empty server. He claims that other sites running on that server are very fast.

It's running MSSQL 2008. Is there any way to determine if it's definitely a hosting issue? They claim that it is the way the code is written that's causing issues. Obviously that's incorrect because many other PC sites are running smoothly out there...

Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 1:01pm

Might be worth copying the site to another host and see if it runs better there. Obviously you can't launch in this form - were I the client I certainly would be unhappy. Jolt may be willing to pull a copy over to their server, and I certailnly would be willing to assist you in that regard and put a copy on my server for testing. If you wish to consider this, give me a call.

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GreyBeard Design Group

Certified ProductCart Developer

Web Design/Development/Hosting

http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code |

Posted By: katharina
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 1:08pm

I'm running one SQL2008 and have no issues. No change in the code either. You only have to be careful when you upgrade to never versions of PC that add to the database table. Nothing major at all.

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Katharina
*******************
www.GermanPlaza.com
*******************

Posted By: Brett
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 3:01pm

If you're worried that some custom code on your files is making the site go slow, you could set up a cloned folder with the default site files.

http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/how_to/create_default_store?s[]=default&s[]=files

This should show you how fast the default installation runs on your web server. If it's still slow then you could probably rule your files out as a problem.

Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 3:38pm

We are working with dccreatives on this via our support ticket system, but wanted to update this thread with some information that might be interesting for other users:

Here is category page, completely static: we saved the HTML code from the browser and FTP'd the file to the "pc" directory. In other words, ProductCart has absolutely nothing to do with this page. In our tests, it took over 10 seconds to load:
http://www.kennethreeve.com/store/pc/Boyshort-c49-static.htm - http://www.kennethreeve.com/store/pc/Boyshort-c49-static.htm http://www.kennethreeve.com/store/pc/Boyshort-c49-static-b.htm -
We started looking for potential causes for this really long loading time, and found that the loading of the Google Translate API played a big role. Here is the same exact page (again, this is not a re-written URL, this is a completely static file), without the JavaScript for the Google Translate API:
http://www.kennethreeve.com/store/pc/Boyshort-c49-static-b.htm - http://www.kennethreeve.com/store/pc/Boyshort-c49-static-b.htm

We are still researching the matter and are not sure yet as to all of the causes of slow performance for this particular Web site, but the difference in page-loading time when removing the Google Translate API was pretty staggering (make sure that you are using a completely new browser session when testing the above-mentioned URLs).

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The ProductCart Team

Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software

Posted By: Brett
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 3:48pm

If even static pages are loading slow, then it sounds like it's not an issue with the database at all, but perhaps an issue with the http server. Hopefully it's just the Google Translate API like you said.

Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 3:54pm

Brett wrote:

Hopefully it's just the Google Translate API like you said.

Unfortunately that's not the case. That's just one factor that we wanted to point out in case other merchants plan to use that API as it does appear to affect performance.

In this case, however, there must be other factors at play and we are still researching what they are. We'll post back when we know more.

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The ProductCart Team

Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software

Posted By: dccreatives
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 5:31pm

We actually just added the google translate earlier today. We have been dealing with this issue for several weeks now, so although it may slow things down somewhat, I don't believe this is the major factor here.

Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 6:38pm

We did a substantial amount of testing, including setting up a completely separate mirror store, on one of our Web servers (hosted at MaximumASP), connected to the same SQL database (hosted at CrystalTech). The site was almost twice as fast, but still somewhat slow.

Then, all of a sudden, pages started loading much, much faster, without any changes whatsoever on the ProductCart side.

So, at this point, it appears that there was indeed an issue of some sort in the CrystalTech hosting environment. We are trying to confirm with them.

One thing is for sure: we are very tired of hosting companies that immediately put the blame on our software when there is an issue, completely failing to acknowledge that ProductCart is being used by thousands of stores, in hundreds of different Web hosting configurations.

For this reason, we have been talking internally here at Early Impact about the idea of creating a list of "Approved Hosting Providers": companies will be approved only if they commit to providing quality hosting for ProductCart-powered stores, and follow a list of required procedures, including providing a direct support contact, and communicating with us directly when there is an unusual issue (e.g. an unusual performance problem). More on that soon.

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The ProductCart Team

Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software

Posted By: katharina
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 7:09pm

Nice idea. Can you add a customer rating system with it. One that not only allows a rating, but also comments. It is obviously subjective to the individual user's opinion, but provides deeper insight as to as far a provider will go for their customers.

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Katharina
*******************
www.GermanPlaza.com
*******************

Posted By: Brett
Date Posted: 29-November-2010 at 7:21pm

I think it was pretty easy to rule out ProductCart when you look at the fact that hundreds if not thousands of us are running the latest version (along with older versions) with no such issues.

I thought his hosting provider was blaming code customizations on the slowdown. Since they were recommended by EI according the the original post, it's safe to assume they know that the productcart code itself isn't the problem.

It's great to see that the custom code(I'm assuming that installation was customized a bit - looks pretty slick), probably isn't the issue, and that everything should work fine once the server is fixed.