Every other page on the site is blazingly fast, but this one even with even one item with no options in the cart takes forever what gives? Having a slow page at checkout time is terrible 
I have done a lot of optimizations (APC, php-fpm, apache worker and so on) and most pages have less than 250ms response time. But this page is like 4 or 5 seconds!
Are you using Live shipping rates (i.e. USPS, FEDex, UPS)? If so I have the same problem because of the live rates. Send me your website in PM I would like to see how well your loading really. I haven't tried APC or php-fpm. I'm using Litespeed to increase my speed which has us going pretty good.
I'll keep that in mind. And I don't mind posting it as long as I can plug it for a bit of PR.
[quote name='Atrix' timestamp='1349415186' post='146397']
I'll keep that in mind. And I don't mind posting it as long as I can plug it for a bit of PR.
[/quote]
Yep your site seems pretty fast. Your checkout page took less than 1.5 seconds for me.
[quote name=‘solesurvivor’ timestamp=‘1349447034’ post=‘146425’]
Yep your site seems pretty fast. Your checkout page took less than 1.5 seconds for me.
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Thanks 
Ya it takes longer with even one item especially if it has product options.
Actually, unfortunately, I do not consider your site to be what I would consider to be “fast” in any way.
I experienced a 10-15 second initial (first time visit) home page load here in the USA, and even subsequent (browser cached) visits were in the 3-5 second range.
You do have a rather graphic intensive site which certainly slows down the page load, so you may want to consider a CDN service on your checklist as well.
PS: Your site does look quite nice, (actually it is a very sweet site) so good job on the design!
[quote name=‘Struck’ timestamp=‘1349468593’ post=‘146475’]
Actually, unfortunately, I do not consider your site to be what I would consider to be “fast” in any way.
I experienced a 10-15 second initial (first time visit) home page load here in the USA, and even subsequent (browser cached) visits were in the 4-7 second range.
You do have a rather graphic intensive site which certainly slows down the page load, so you may want to consider a CDN service on your checklist as well.
PS: Your site does look quite nice, so good job on the design!
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You might check with your ISP, or your net connection I just tested it. Yes it is a graphic intensive design. Yes that will effect the load time you talk about. But when I say speed I mean server response time. This is the issue with the cart page. The server, in other words php scripts and sql queries and so on, are adding 3 to 5 seconds with even one product!
I have the server response time down to less than 200ms on almost all pages.
It goes without saying an image intensive great looking design will add “time”. But the true “time” that matters is the time between requesting the page and when the user begins to see content, especially in an industry where flare and looks are so meaningful like the after market motorcycle industry.
As comparison Google.com takes 2.28 seconds to completely load and it's almost no images at all pulling in 247.5 kilobytes.
This site has huge product images etc and is 3.4 megabytes. Most the time is spent in receiving. I don't consider your metric really plausible, otherwise people would just have text only sites.
Before the optimizations CS Cart with even 600 products would have server response times of over 1.2 seconds.
That meant it was a blank screen for 1.2 seconds or more while the user just waited to see that the site and their net is even working. Now it's down to less than 200ms. I would consider that fast and a huge improvement. Especially as there's over 7000 items in the database now.
Regards,
Chisum
I'm following you Atrix, that is why I suggested the possibility of a CDN service.
I know of a handful of extremely fast CS-Cart sites in operation, one of which is [url=“http://www.ledpolar.com/”]Parked at Loopia as an example.
Like i said Atrix, you have a beautiful, very professional looking site, however, there is alot loading in the background before the page is fully done loading. I choose to view our site using a customer’s perception as to whether it “appears” to them as being slow, or screaming fast, to me that is far more important than what Google page speed tells me is acceptable or not, it is all about the customer’s perception in my book.
I have an advantage in that for our products it is not necessary to have large super high resolution images in order to sell our products, and I can see that for your market it is quite important for a professional presentation. So of course there will be a trade-off in quality presentation vs. page speed. There is an apparent trend in websites becoming slower and slower, although I guess I for one am not willing to accept & follow the trend. 
That is pretty peppy there Struck. After initial page load tho, most content is redundant. I'm not saying a CDN wouldn't help but it might not be that necessary right now. First I'd want to take a look at nginx over apache as it has implemented recently a system that can improve response time by over 1000x from what I read. There is reverse proxy caching for apache too but nginx has it built in and just seems much simpler to manage once you learn it.
I know the current HTTP standard lowers the amount of current connections to two, so if I am concerned about the receiving I might put all non product images into a sprite. But I sort of did that in a way already with data uri's in the css file. For large images however I kept them out of the css file and each product image should still be downloaded separately… so while I could see some benefit from a CDN it isn't my #1 priority right now but thank you. Compared to the old site the owner had, which had still graphic intensive pages but with a server response time of over 1.6 seconds sometimes… on just product pages, this is a pretty big deal as a cached load on most product pages is 2.05 seconds for me. only .2 seconds slower than google while it's pulling in a lot more data. So I'm pretty happy with it. For now my clients needs aren't the vastly improved speed but some other ventures that will have higher capitol return. Like integration with ebay services.
Nevertheless, you have created a very nice site which I am certain your client will be happy with.
[quote]For now my clients needs aren’t the vastly improved speed but some other ventures that will have higher capitol return. Like integration with ebay services.[/quote]
Regarding Ebay integration, CS-Cart says “SOON” (or something remotely along those lines!)
[quote name=‘Struck’ timestamp=‘1349477673’ post=‘146489’]
Nevertheless, you have created a very nice site which I am certain your client will be happy with.
Regarding Ebay integration, CS-Cart says “SOON” (or something remotely along those lines!)
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Thanks I liked your site alot too having not much data or images does make it pretty peppy in conjunction with the other things I am sure you did
I heard about the ebay thing but my client and I have no idea the level of control or automation this will have… and he has specific needs so we might move ahead with our own implementation anyway which will update stock and pricing nightly from our suppliers on both this and ebay, and let the order system on our cart take in all the orders and even calculate paying our sales team and so on based on all of it. I know their solution could meet some of our needs I just don’t know how many. I researched the third party solutions available too services that cost about $99 a month. And it sounds like cs cart is taking this model. So technically given enough time passing… it’d be cheaper to have me develop it for him. Anyway I do hope they release something parts of which we can use Thanks for your input struck.
I wonder if I turn live shipping off it will fix the view cart page issue as the check cart page is so fast.
That site is actually from one of our friendly CS-Cart forum members named Adrian8, very knowledgeable fella whom gave me some very useful tips awhile back!
[quote]I wonder if I turn live shipping off it will fix the view cart page issue [/quote]
Do you mean disabling your realtime shipping rates? If so, then you already know the answer to this! There is quite alot of calculating behind the scenes being performed for each realtime rate call, multiplied by the number of carriers setup in your store (UPS, Fedex, USPS, etc). We are currently using realtime rate calculations from Fedex & USPS along with some manual rate calculations concurrently. We have had some intermittent slowdown issues at times in past, although no current concerns. We are heavily shipping dependent so realtime rates are an absolute necessity for our business! (Fortunately we do not require high res images or I would be working even harder to maintain site speed!) 
[quote name=‘Struck’ timestamp=‘1349480598’ post=‘146497’]
That site is actually from one of our friendly CS-Cart forum members named Adrian8, very knowledgeable fella whom gave me some very useful tips awhile back!
Do you mean disabling your realtime shipping rates? If so, then you already know the answer to this! There is quite alot of calculating behind the scenes being performed for each realtime rate call, multiplied by the number of carriers setup in your store (UPS, Fedex, USPS, etc). We are currently using realtime rate calculations from Fedex & USPS along with some manual rate calculations concurrently. We have had some intermittent slowdown issues at times in past, although no current concerns. We are heavily shipping dependent so realtime rates are an absolute necessity for our business! (Fortunately we do not require high res images or I would be working even harder to maintain site speed!)
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Ya I do. I’m glad, it was mentioned above but I wasn’t sure. I just wish that the real time shipping was calculated then via an ajax call after the initial page load (and showed loading for shipping and total maybe). We only use fedex but it seems to be really slow.
I’ll talk to the client and see if they think we should turn it off or not. If it’s turned off and you click on calculate shipping, does that still work?
Just a couple of quick suggestions which you may or may not have already considered:
- When you navigate from any secure page on your site back to a non-secure page, you will notice an annoying blank white page displayed until the page reloads, also quite a time consuming wait for this switch IMO. If you go to Admin>Settings>General (Tick: Keep HTTPS connection once a secure page is visited) you will notice a much smoother/faster page transition. Give this a try and the overall feel may grow on you! (Our site actually flies in HTTPS mode so I love it…) This was actually one of my brilliant ideas from a couple years back!
- You might want to try changing this setting so that during checkout your customers are first directed to the actual cart page before the registration/login page: Admin>Settings>General (When the customer clicks on any Checkout button/link in the store, redirect to the Cart content page first) Might be interesting to see if this sequence change has any effect at all on the checkout page, cart page load times considering “locations” are also being determined in CS-Cart? Regardless, many of us, me included find it far more logical for the customer to view their cart page for a verification before going thru a registration process and proceding, your call of course.
Do also note that if you've cleared your cache, that the checkout page can be very slow to load since it has to rebuild almost all of the cache components. Do you see a significant difference in first access versus subsequent accesses?
Thank you both for the suggestions and tips will check them out. I think for the https on pages I kept them for google analytics or something… I’ll have to double check how that effects that.
And ya That checkout setting does make more sense. But with it slow as it is I don’t want to link them yet.
And ya tbirn, it’s is slower with no cache but with cache it’s still slow