The speed at which CS-Cart runs depends on multiple variables relating to store settings and the server it is running on.
The script itself is a bit query heavy because of all the standard features it includes and that can degrade speed on a busy shop if all features are enabled. Disabling unneeded features will improve overall speed but, there will still remain conditionals within the code to check whether or not these features are active or not. If you have some basic experience in PHP and Smarty templates, you can remove some of these conditionals and further reduce queries needed for even faster page loading.
Don’t let that detour you because the cart does load well and is comparable to other similar types with these features. Selecting to store images in the file system instead of database can also improve speed depending on the server environment. I believe the new version still defaults to database image storage but that is easily changed in settings.
As mentioned above, it also depends greatly on the server it is running on. If that server is congested with other data driven sites then the script performance can be poor at times while trying to process the queries to the MySQL server. Many data driven sites on a server can also create quite an overhead on server resources especially if that server is running PHP as CGI instead of an Apache module.
If you are really wanting to determine loading time and efficiency of any data driven script, be sure to demo them on multiple servers as well as localhost.
[quote name=‘Musaaf’]Can anyone tell me the how cs-cart handles 1000 products ?
[/QUOTE]
I manage a store running 1.3.5 sp1 (CSS skin) with over 3000 products and it’s very quick.
L
[quote name=‘Lorian’]I manage a store running 1.3.5 sp1 (CSS skin) with over 3000 products and it’s very quick.
L[/QUOTE]
I have over 10,000 products. and everything was running fine until i flipped the switched yesterday, and have customers start coming to the site. The site was basically taking over 20 seconds to load a page when I had 20 customers on the site.
I had to shut it down and go back to my old site until someone can somehow help me out.
I have the images loading from the file system.
Does anyone else have any ideas of what I may be able to do to get my site to load faster when there is traffic on it?
thanks
Mark
I am personally going to be using static pages so I don’t have to query the database every time.
But you can look up a previous post I made, “14 Performance Tips from Yahoo”. Another poster made a few tests with the suggestions and improved performance quite a bit on a dynamic site.
for the original poster, I have not gone live, but the pages are a bit heavy on the first load without any gzip compression. You would also want to also turn off any add-on that is not being used. If you have a long category list, then possibly making that a static list instead of querying the database on every page.
CS-Cart does not have a proper caching feature. I talked with support about it and they said it cannot be done.
I must say that CS-Cart might seem to be slow. But considering how dynamic and feature-rich CS-Cart is, you should really invest in a virtual or dedicated server that has some type of an isolated MySQL database enhancing container. Also maybe upgrade your server ram.
Does CS-Cart have a special partnership with CyberLNC Hosting? Where are they located? How can I find more information about them?
[quote name=‘VelocityMicro’]Does CS-Cart have a special partnership with CyberLNC Hosting? Where are they located? How can I find more information about them?[/quote]
CS-Cart has no affiliation with CyberLNC.
I personally recommend CyberLNC for many reasons that I could list but for me the most appropriate can be summarised with
A) Security
B) Stability (Have never witnessed a server fault)
C) Extremely good resource vs clientele ratio.
Not the cheapest and most people will wage war on price, I look beyond my cheque book for peace of mind 
PS: No I don’t earn a commission of any sort for this 
I’m still in test mode but it’s going to be impossible to go live with the kinds of response times I’m getting.
Our current shop (Miva - ick in programming terms but has never had speed issues) came up clean on http://www.websiteoptimization.com
It’s not huge - we have a couple of hundred products and usually not more than 20 customers on there at a time.
But the results on the CS-Cart test site - with a fraction of the images loaded - were disastrous. Is there something I am missing here? Will changing host (aaargh - awful thought) or paying for a dedicated server really make that much difference?
It’s disappointing. In every other way CS-Cart seems way superior to Miva, but I can’t go live with a shop that takes MINUTES to load.
Do you care to post the url for us to review?
And also you cant compare apples to oranges. I mean, to me comparing a featureless cart to a more featured cart is like comparing Windows 98 to Windows Vista.
The more features and functionality the more resources it will take.
Now i’m not saying CS doesn’t need some work, all software can continually be improved, but the 2 packages aren’t the same thing. At least in my opinion, for whatever that is worth.
Er yes, but fully featured doesn’t cut much ice if it’s too slow for customers to actually buy anything. Plus Miva doesn’t lack features (it’s certainly not “featureless” - it offers most of what CS-Cart does, though not all) - I changed to CS-Cart because Miva is a pain to program. CS-Cart is far better - cleaner code and more modular - but if it’s going to take someone on a dial-up minutes to get the front page to download, then I can’t actually use it. Which considering the amount of work I’ve put into the set up would be - hmm, not sure of the euphemism to use - not good?!
I’ll post the URL when there’s some decent graphics there and one or two other things are working (we’re a design studio so not happy to hit our own brand by posting a page with place-holder graphics). Meantime, can you make some practical suggestions please? What steps can be taken to improve this?
I have to add - the Windows comparison made me wince. What, you think I should get all my customers to upgrade their PCs to use CS-Cart. ROTFL! (er, joke, but you get the analogy?)
Please make some useful suggestions - I don’t need to hear a defence of CS-Cart - I quite like many aspects of the software and it’s potentially a good cart. What I need is some ideas for getting my cart to run at a usable speed.
So - positive steps please, not defensiveness.
If you like I can post the report that I got from the optimisation site - but I warn you, it makes unsettling reading. Particularly as many of the “warnings” seem to have nothing to do with the graphics (which okay, I can try to reduce a bit more - though there is a point at which poor quality graphics just hurt our business - and the current cart runs with three times the graphics and no speed problems).
It’s also “clean” code - I haven’t changed anything significant at all - no CSS changes, no template changes, just popped in new graphics, most of which are already optimised - so these problems seem to be inbuilt in the code.
So - what’s the solution?
The problem is the javascript and css files are very large. Also, the base template has a lot of small images and makes many http requests.
The best solution is to enable gzip on the server and try using the jsmart script outlined here:
[url]http://forum.cs-cart.com/showthread.php?t=5623&highlight=yahoo[/url]
If you are able to, you can possibly load up only certain javascript files on the home page. Depending on what featueres you are using on your home page, you may not need all the javascript files to load up on the home page, but can layer it as they go deeper into the site. Thus, spreading out the page sizes.
I asked for information to try and offer help, except you became annoyed with my analogy and became defensive yourself.
Considering you have provided no useful information about your server, your site , or anything else… The rest of us are in the dark about what could be some or any of your issues.
If you would like to post that information, you might get more help as other users may have some similar experiences based on hosting company, servers ,etc.
If not, well then thats your choice.
[quote name=‘ETInteractive’]I asked for information to try and offer help, except you became annoyed with my analogy and became defensive yourself.
Considering you have provided no useful information about your server, your site , or anything else… The rest of us are in the dark about what could be some or any of your issues.
If you would like to post that information, you might get more help as other users may have some similar experiences based on hosting company, servers ,etc.
If not, well then thats your choice.[/QUOTE]
The server is Dreamhost. I’ll post the results I got in the post below (as they’re long and some will prefer to skip them).
The current shop - with lots of nice features and no speed problems is here:
http://www.baba-store.com
I explained - clearly I hope - why I won’t put the test shop on a public forum. I can email you the link privately - or to anyone else interested. No problem.
As I say, we are moving only because Miva is a pain to program and has bugs that are irritating. I had also hoped for better customer service from CS-Cart. Hmm, well, one can hope! (insert “grin” smiley here).
I was laughing at your description of Miva as “featureless”- not being defensive (me, defend Miva, heaven forbid!) - I can’t stand the bugginess of Miva, but to be fair to it, “featureless” is hardly accurate .
How about making some useful suggestions? That would really be appreciated as a hugely slow download is not going to work for our shop.
your on a $6/month shared server with 1000+ other sites, that’s why your site is slow…
So, here’s the report we got from the optimisation site (okay, okay, they are to some extent selling their services, but having said that, they gave our current shop an almost entirely clean report). All comments, help etc. would be very welcome.
Again, this is unaltered CS-Cart - we’ve only changed graphics and added an out of the box standard skin - New Vision blue.
I’ve been talking to Dreamhost about this, and they had a few quite useful suggestions about settings, linking etc. But this report is AFTER I implemented their suggestions.
____________
Analysis and Recommendations
· TOTAL_HTML - Congratulations, the total number of HTML files on this page (including the main HTML file) is 1 which most browsers can multithread. Minimizing HTTP requests is key for web site optimization.
· TOTAL_OBJECTS - Warning! The total number of objects on this page is 79 - consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Combine, refine, and optimize your external objects. Replace graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests.
· TOTAL_IMAGES - Warning! The total number of images on this page is 69 , consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Combine, refine, and optimize your graphics. Replace graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests.
· TOTAL_CSS - Congratulations, the total number of external CSS files on this page is 2 . Because external CSS files must be in the HEAD of your HTML document, they must load first before any BODY content displays. Although they are cached, CSS files slow down the initial display of your page.
· TOTAL_SIZE - Warning! The total size of this page is 467874 bytes, which will load in 109.05 seconds on a 56Kbps modem. Consider reducing total page size to less than 30K to achieve sub eight second response times on 56K connections. Pages over 100K exceed most attention thresholds at 56Kbps, even with feedback. Consider contacting us about our optimization services.
· TOTAL_SCRIPT - Warning! The total number of external script files on this page is 7 , consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Combine, refine, and optimize your external script files. Ideally you should have one (or even embed scripts for high-traffic pages) on your pages.
· HTML_SIZE - Congratulations, the total size of this HTML file is 7605 bytes, which less than 20K. Assuming that you specify the HEIGHT and WIDTH of your images, this size allows your page to display content in well under 8 seconds, the average time users are willing to wait for a page to display without feedback.
· IMAGES_SIZE - Warning! The total size of your images is 328703 bytes, which is over 30K. Consider optimizing your images for size, combining them, and replacing graphic rollovers with CSS.
· SCRIPT_SIZE - Warning! The total size of external your scripts is 91626 bytes, which is over 8K. Consider optimizing your scripts for size, combining them, and using compression where appropriate for any scripts placed in the HEAD of your documents.
· CSS_SIZE - Warning! The total size of your external CSS is 39940 bytes, which is over 8K. Consider optimizing your CSS for size by eliminating whitespace, using shorthand notation, and combining multiple CSS files where appropriate.
· MULTIM_SIZE - Congratulations, the total size of all your external multimedia files is 0 bytes, which is less than 4K.
[quote name=‘S-Combs’]Selecting to store images in the file system instead of database can also improve speed depending on the server environment. I believe the new version still defaults to database image storage but that is easily changed in settings.[/QUOTE]
By the way, I had already done that - a while back - as we do use quite a few images.
[quote name=‘snorocket’]your on a $6/month shared server with 1000+ other sites, that’s why your site is slow…[/QUOTE]
So you would suggest paying for a dedicated server? Is that more or less a CS-Cart requirement in your experience?
Our current shop has always run fine - Dreamhost are okay if not wonderful - but if this is the only way to make this work…
And another question. Is it wise to use the in-built software to make the thumbnails, or is there some way of over-riding this and putting in optimised thumbnails direct?
In other words, does the routine for making the thumbnails automatically produce well-optimised files? In Miva we’ve always made the thumbnails ourselves (which is a heavy workload at times, so having them made automatically would certainly be easier).
Baba,
I checked your homepage and your images are HUGE!
[url]http://www.baba-store.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/150VRbook-web.jpg[/url]
That thumbnail alone is 30kb. Your output results show your Images are taking up about 70% of your total page bytes.
I took the image above and opened it in Photoshop, without editing a thing, resaved it at 100% Full JPG and the file resaved at 17kb. A reduction of almost 50% in filesize. again, without any editing or changes to the file.
If I output the JPG using 80%, I can get the filesize down to 12kb.
I bet if you redo all your images, and get them down in size, you might see some noticeable performance gains.
Also, I dont know anything about Dreamhost, but if they limit your CPU/Memory usage, you will get some slow downs with that as well. But I can’t speak for them.
![http://www.baba-store.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/150VRbook-web.jpg[/url]](http://www.baba-store.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/150VRbook-web.jpg%5B/url%5D){kind=link}