Community Forums

by **sagarg** » Wed May 02, 2012 9:07 pm

Hi,

I am hoping someone can help me.
I am developing a website which will contain over 75,000 individual products.
I have already created the relevant import scripts to import all my supplier data into OpenCart, however, it is running EXTREMELY slow when navigating using the categories or search functions. Even the homepage takes about 30 - 35 seconds to come up.
I'm currently on a shared server with MySql hosted on another box so I know this will play some part in the speed but I just want to know if anyone has ever had some many products imported and if it worked.
If so, what is the best hosting (spec) server package to go on (vps, dedicated, cloud?).
Any help with any code tweaks that will increase performance would also be great.

Look forward to some helpful replies.

Thanks
SG

by **i2Paq** » Wed May 02, 2012 9:32 pm

Used our FREE search on this?

by **Qphoria** » Thu May 03, 2012 1:59 am

Set category product counts to disabled if you have a large store. We are going to need to cache the product counts at some point

by **Tcalp** » Thu May 03, 2012 4:16 am

Give this extension a try : http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=6204

A demo can be viewed online here : http://www.hunterbm.com/oc/1521/

It will drastically speed things up for you.

by **MarketInSG** » Thu May 03, 2012 9:37 am

This is good: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... order=DESC

But i'm sure OpenCart can handle this. But you, on the other hand, must ensure your host can too.

by **arames** » Sat May 05, 2012 2:11 pm

Well aside from Daniel being unfriendly and arrogant sometimes, but OpenCart is for FREE dont forget it.

It can handle your 75'000 products i guess, but I am sure you will face the same issue we are having with our 14'000 products.

FIRST TIME BYTE being very very very slow....

If you like us use webpagetest.org to see how your site performs, you will see that you will ALWAYS get F grade of First Time Byte.

Example:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120505_DE_47QA0/

you can try it for ANY other OpenCart live site, you will get the same F result.

Why is that? Because too many Database query and OpenCart will handle them with struggle (even if you are like us on a Dedicated Server ... the error is from OpenCart and how it handles these Database requests)

So my advice is to think twice before moving here and test any cart you wish first for the speed then make your choice.

Warm regards,
Arames T.

by **shoppingman** » Sat May 05, 2012 6:38 pm

With that kind of amount of items, man you might definitely wanna think about a few dedicated servers. The amount of items is one thing and the other is the traffic, mailing etc.etc. involved. Maybe you need to do some work and try to get an idea as to how giants like eBay etc etc are dealing with huge amount of listings, traffic, mailing lists etc.etc.etc.
The exact same question arose with Everysoft with the everyauction perl based pl/cgi script in the late 90's and early 2000's. Back then a very popular GNU auction script which is no longer supported - terminated. It was a great community to learn Perl. They never get around a solution for huge amount of listings and traffic. It was a flat file script. The question left unanswered.
OC is a DB thing which of course has it's advantages compared with flat file scripts. Flat file, of course, has it's limits.
OC is also a great community among others to learn PHP, CSS, MYSQL etc.etc.etc .
I don't think a host will be an issue as there are great and huge data centers out there which can handle that. That's where the third thing comes in - the price. Most of us are on inexpensive shared servers and some on dedicated servers. That's affordable BUT going bigger will cost a lot of "bread". So the bottom line, a lot of home work needed to be done. The big question still remains, if OC can handle all those stuff. Maybe the big guns from the VALLEY can answer the question but those guys are also very expensive.
It would be too big a risk to go live with that amount of items without getting a genuine answer to this question.

by **goalsurfer** » Sun May 13, 2012 6:51 pm

I'm having the same problem with as much of products. But I saw the site where the products come from is zencart powered and doesn't have the problem of being slow.

by **arames** » Sun May 13, 2012 7:10 pm

Did you try the zencart shop on Webpagetest.org ?

Also kindly note that here are now around 5 extension on OpenCart to reduce the loading speed and increase the caching .. I am using 4 of them and the speed has gone from 6.8 seconds to just 1.4 seconds!

by **sw!tch** » Sun May 13, 2012 7:39 pm

I haven't used openCart with many products yet, but I have a client who runs Oscommerce with 150K products and about 600K customers. We needed two highend dedicated servers to power it. One for the HTTP requests and another for mySQL, alot of query optimization and caching had to be done as well.

As others have mentioned is really depends on the the traffic, you might need load balancers,etc. If I had to do the server setup over again, I would have went with dedicated scalable cloud servers. We had a flush of traffic one time that took both servers down instantly only option was to upgrade which was days of downtime.

Talk with a network administrator they are usually helpful on setups.

by **goalsurfer** » Sun May 13, 2012 7:41 pm

arames wrote:...here are now around 5 extension on OpenCart to reduce the loading speed ..

Then which ones?

I saw for X-cart you pay a one time fee $149.00 and you can put an unlimited number of products. You can also try it out for free.

Here the link for the test of the zencart site
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120513_JM_CDA/
Can you say if it is their server or zencart that makes the speed better?

by **arames** » Mon May 14, 2012 12:48 am

Well if you are willing to pay for a cart then I would definitely go for CubeCart version 4, do NOT choose the new version 5 since version 4 has been there for years now and has 0 Bugs and a lot of adds on.

Where as the new version 5 is here recently and still in testing period ... you can of course test it for free for up to 300 orders I guess

The price is also acceptable and can definitely handle 75k products and more, again CDN would be a wide choice for your dedicated server.

by **dvh** » Thu May 24, 2012 2:23 pm

Great thread that talks honestly about opencarts limitations out of the box.

It really doesn't like large product databases (10k +) in standard form. When we're finally up and running I think we may write about what we've tried, what's worked and what really hasn't.

by **storm-cloud** » Sun May 27, 2012 8:06 am

Qphoria wrote:Set category product counts to disabled if you have a large store. We are going to need to cache the product counts at some point

Is there a few ways to achieve this result? I have a vQmod in place but I don't actually remember where I found the code.

It seems to simply replace instances of:

Code: Select all: 'name' => $category['name'] . ' (' . $product_total . ')',

With:

Code: Select all: 'name' => $category['name']/* . ' (' . $product_total . ')'*/,

Is this all that is required or are there other methods to disable product counts?

Regarding the other mods by Tcalp and JAY6390, if OpenCart requires modification to perform faster and this code has been established, is there any reason why this isn't part of the core files?