General slowness, and other oddities

[Robin Somes]

CC 6.06, All-in-One shipping, Product Addons, SagePay and PayPal payment gateways.

Site: www.piscesconservation.com/cube

Our site, both the site itself and the admin pages, are quite frequently *desperately* slow; sometimes the pages load eventually, other times I get a 504 Gateway Timeout error. If the shop site page loading fails in this way, then any shopping cart contents are lost on pressing 'Refresh' and the page eventually loading properly. On the admin pages, any changes I've just made are lost on the Gateway Timeout.

The shop currently only has 11 items and 11 images. Our existing Actinic-based shop (www.piscesconservation.com/shop) is hosted on the same server, is considerably more complex with approx. 150 items, and functions perfectly well.

Obviously there are any number of variables that could cause the slow performance - including the relatively old hosting platform our site is based on (out of my control for the time being), and tracking down precisely which is causing it might take a while. So, any suggestions for general good housekeeping etc to optimise site performance. And any issues known to cause such slowness?

Cheers,

Robin

Edited June 24, 2015 by Robin Somes

[havenswift-hosting]

Hi

If you are getting 504 gateway errors then it is absolutely nothing at all to do with CubeCart - these are only generated where a gateway or proxy server doesn’t get a response from the upstream server (almost always your web server), usually because the upstream server is down or responding far too slowly. After waiting a while, the gateway server will return a “504 gateway time-out” error. The old hosting platform is almost certainly the cause and CubeCart can and does (we have several customers like this) easily cope with tens or hundreds of thousands of products with associated images and can also cope with high concurrent visitor levels - again several customers with multi-million pound (GBP) turnover businesses running on CubeCart.

You have said previously of issues with hosting and that it is out of your control but issues like this will unfortunately continue.  With 11 products there is absolutely nothing that can be done to optimise the site 

Ian

[bsmither]

"Our existing Actinic-based shop is hosted on the same server and functions perfectly well."

Is there an .htaccess file for /shop/, and does it have directives for some sort of external caching mechanism?

[Robin Somes]

"Our existing Actinic-based shop is hosted on the same server and functions perfectly well."

Is there an .htaccess file for /shop/, and does it have directives for some sort of external caching mechanism?

There isn't one in the /shop/ folder, and the only one higher up the directory structure that I'm aware of is a simple one-liner unrelated to it. My uneducated guess (and it is just that) is that it's because the Actinic site runs on Perl and Javascript, whereas the CC site is PHP/SQL based, which is where the clunkiness of the server comes in. 

As Ian has pointed out above (thanks, Ian), it's almost certainly the result of the legacy platform we're on. I'm in the position of trying to make the best of a bad lot at the moment; our ISP has a lovely shiny expensive new platform, but for now the migration process is entirely manual, and for work and family reasons I simply don't have the time to migrate 15+ domains manually, or to find a new ISP and transfer to them. Not going to happen. Come the end of the year (or so they've promised us...) they will have automated the migration process.