Site is very slow

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.

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.

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.

Edited by Brett - 29-November-2010 at 7:24pm