The simple answer to your question is yes. But there are other factors to consider, including the server you’re using and its connection to the internet.
If you’re already running a busy store you probably have your own server, if not, you should. Going through a web hosting company and getting lumped into a server with five or six hundred other web sites can really slow things down. Anyone with that busy of a store should have their own server, located in a top tier data center. Contact me if you need help on this.
As far as CS-Cart is concerned, it’s pretty fast, but there are several people that have brought up speed issues. I haven’t looked at their sites, but a couple of folks were talking about using xHTML, which CS-C currently does not do. They re-wrote the code in xHTML and things seem to be much faster for them. You can probably get one of them to do the same for you for a price. It shouldn’t be much of a project since they’ve done it already.
One of the biggest factors affecting the speed of a store is the store itself. Flashy graphics and lots of product pictures will have a huge impact on “speed”, but not because of the store itself. A page with 5 Mb’s of graphics just isn’t going to come up in 5 seconds through a dial-up modem, or through a hosting company that throttles your connection.
Others have opined that CS-C’s use of Smarty Templates is a drain on speed. I suppose this can be true as well, but I think the other factors I’ve mentioned have more of an impact than anything else.
So as far as speed is concerned, CS-C isn’t a Formula One racecar, but it has many other aspects that make it the cart I chose for my company. I like the features and functions it has. For the price, this cart does a lot of things that would cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars from other cart providers. I really appreciate the people at CS-C. My personal experience is that they go WAY beyond the call of duty for customer service and support. Did I say ‘way’? I meant to say WAY, WAY beyond the call of duty. As an added plus, these forums are full of praises from customers about how reasonably priced and fast CS-C is for custom work.
For $200, you’re not going to get a better cart. There are several people that have developed some pretty useful add-on’s that are either free or very reasonably priced. The power users and guru’s are generous with their expertise and you’ll find hundred’s of examples of code snippets they have taken the time to write for people needing something special. It’s a good group here.
Cheers,
MikeK
If you decide to try it out on a busy server with lots of orders and traffic. And compare it to your previous solution, please post the results here. I am interested in knowing how much it really can handle.
i am also very interested in cs-cart performances udner heavy traffic (>3000 visits/day)
i don’t know yet how much caching does cs-cart use.
i know that a light templte and dedicated server are a must to ensure good performances… but i also know that cs-cart stores all its languages in db tables… and it loads a lot of data before tarting rendering any page…
i know that “rendering” the whole store to static html is a good working solution… and there were some discussions about which direction to take to develop it further…
looking forward into this topic soon!
ciao
In my opinion there are a lot of things CS-Cart could move over to files. Such as the languages and categories (which rarely get changed). However the developers don’t seem to agree on this as they don’t believe that the database queries slows the cart down.
I know for sure I’d rather see the cart use 50 queries than 150 on every render.
i was thinking exactly the same thing: to store the language strings as separate (by language) external files…
sicne they get changed jsut via the admin language editor… it should be easy to update these files…
and yes jsut this would be a strong speed improvements (read a few Kb external incldue, isntead of parsing a >10000 records db and put 3000 records in a PHP array…)
Well, go ahead and try to convice CS-Team… I did. More votes the better.