osCommerce Blog - osCommerce solutions for business

Many of our customers complain about the speed of their osCommerce web sites. Often their own customers bring it to their attention, sometimes the slow down is even noticeable in the Administration panel of osCommerce.

osCommerce online store that was started several years ago and was working fast all this time has suddenly become slow - how is it possible? Or why would a very new osCommerce site demonstrate bad performance?

Customers prefer not to wait while the product page is loading, or until the order is created - if the site is slow customers would leave it. Some researches say customers would not usually wait more than 4 seconds to see the page loaded!

There could be a number of issues with both the hardware and software that affect the performance of osCommerce. Here is the list of what needs to be checked to make sure your osCommerce-powered business doesn’t loose customers because of poor performance:

• web server average load and hardware configuration - maybe the web server needs an upgrade (extra memory or new CPU for example) or maybe its hard drive is full and needs cleaning
• database server configuration - MySQL needs to be optimised to work in the most efficient way. Mostly this relates to using cached queries. More on MySQL server optimisation can be found at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/optimizing-the-server.html
• database structure optimisation - in older osCommerce versions not all database indices were properly implemented. For example, almost any osCommerce web site requires database indices for tables that are used for Best Selling and Customers Who Bought This Product Also Bought features, and these indices were often missing in old installations of osCommerce. Here one can find more information on how to build and use indices: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/optimizing-database-structure.html
• number of database queries per page - osCommerce allows for monitoring not only page loading time, but also the number of database queries used per page. Corresponding contribution can be found here. Obviously the more queries are run against the database - the slower the page will load. So caching parts of the pages that do not change too often can help to improve page loading speed and overall osCommerce performance a lot.
• product images - usage of thumbnails can improve the product listing page loading speed dramatically. And also the loading speed of other pages, where image thumbnails can be used instead of full sized images.
• PHP scripts - PHP scripts can be optimised with tools like PHP Accelerator. As it stays on the PHP Accelerator web site, it
  

  …provides a PHP cache, and is capable of delivering a substantial acceleration of PHP scripts without requiring any script changes, loss of dynamic content, or other application compromises

Holbi has come up with its osCommerce Speed Up / Acceleration service, that includes all of the updates and modifications mentioned above to improve online businesses of its customers.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 8:36 pm and is filed under osCommerce Tips and Tricks, osCommerce Fixes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.