A question of speed.

[JDBComputing]

Hi there,

 

http://jdbcomputing.co.uk/newstore

 

I've been working with Prestashop, considering switching over my online store. 

 

Current problem I'm having is that the site is pretty slow - not very slow, but slower than I'd like - an average of 6-7 seconds per page. 

 

Google Pagespeed shows  between 30/100 and 70/100 depending on the page, and the TTFB is pretty high. 

 

I've got mod_pagespeed enabled, and I'm using CCC and XCache. 

 

The front end and back end ar both pretty slow, although my focus is crrently on the frontend. 

 

My server could use more RAM, but sadly, until March I am fixed into a contract, so for now, optimisation is the game. 

 

As this server performs reasonably well with other sites, such as the WP install as my homepage, and the horribly broken Opencart install at /store/, I'm inclined to believe its an issue directly with the software, so I'm trying to trim a few things down. 

 

First on my list is modifying blocktopmenu so that rather than displaying second level subcats, it only displays, say, "Games and Gaming -> Microsoft" rather than "Games and Gaming -> Microsoft -> XBOX 360". 

 

Over all my subcategories that is currently 50+ unnecessary MySQL calls, per page. I'm not the best at php, so I didn't want to go changing depth's at random in blocktopmenu.php and I was wondering if anyone has done this - all I can find via searching is CSS modifications, which would serve no speed benefit. 

 

Are there any other modules which have been known to cause slowdown? I'd imagine the ebay one is one of the worst, but unfortunately that is 90% of the reason for switching. 

 

Thanks in advance for any help

 

John

 

 

[El Patron]

blocklayered  has been known to sometimes cause issues.

 

did you turn  on debug profiling in defines.inc.php?  I assume you did based on 50 db calls for cat...more info would be needed from these results to really help, even a front office url helps a lot.

[Dh42]

Try using Express Cache from Xtendify, it should give you the speed boost you are wanting. 

[PascalVG]

Also 'new products' can cause a terrible slowdown. The SQL uses function calls to get the 'new' products field (to calculate "current date, minus days considered new") which at a few sites caused a terrible slowdown, even with just a few hundred products. We changed the 'new' status to just a switch on/off (and actually with a cronjob on the db, that checked the new status once a day, in the slow hours)), instead of calculating it every time.

 

Once found that adding/modifying tags cause terrible lags, especially in back office/full server, for about 40 seconds after saving. Uninstalling the blocktags module did wonders here...

 

My 2 cents,

pascal.