Hosting expert adviced needed - specific performance questions.

[Mister Denial]

Hi there,

I have a series of issues with Prestashop on shared Bluehost account:

- CPU throttling, usually between 10 and 30 minutes daily

- slow SQL queries - the log shows some of my PS 1.3.1 queries take between 3 and 8 seconds to execute

- 2000-3000 ms and more between server response and first byte download

- PS RC2 takes 7-8 seconds to fully load with empty categories and no products (default install)



Memcache is enabled, Fast CGI is enabled, all PS RC2 performance optimizations are on, smarty compile is OFF, DB has been repaired and optimized in MySQL - cache on or off does not seem to make any difference.


Yet I have the feeling the website is reacting sluggish.


Questions:

- could two PS websites just be too much for shared hosting, even with fairly low daily visitors ( about 1500 total for both websites) and a catalog of 500 items?

- is running two PS driven websites on the same shared hosting account a bad idea anyways?

- would a dedicated server improve performance, would it be overkill?

- is it at all possible to hope for sub-3 second load times with PS 1.4?

- has anyone tried the High CPU account on Bluehost, and did it improve performance?




Thank you in advance for your help and feedback, hope someone can help me with these issues.



Best regards,

Dan

[Paul C]

You really need to be looking at the server to tell if what you're expecting of it is too much. Things like Gzip compression and memcache could be harming the performance instead of helping it if the server is memory and cpu bound - and busy. Sometimes memory can be the biggest problem - you've said yourself it's shared hosting, so how much of the memory are you actually able to use on there and how often is the server paging to disk?

If it were me I would likely start by turning all but the smarty optimisations off. Then do some measurements to determine a) what advantage the other optimisations were providing, and to establish a baseline. If the control panel on your account lets you view the cpu and memory stats (or maybe you have ssh access?) then all the better.

Paul