Site is loading slow

[CarPartsCentral]

Hopefully, this is the right topic to post this in. My website (carpartscentral.com) is loading really slow sometimes. Usually in the mornings and the evenings, it takes around 10-15sec. to load! That is more then enough time for someone to deteriorate away thinking the website doesn't work. I contacted Rackspace, who is hosting it, and they said to change it to integrated mode rather then classic, in which they did. It did get a little faster, but it is still lagging at times throughout the day. Still the same seconds. I know the server had more than enough bandwidth. Once the main page loads, everything loads quick which leads me to believe it is not the server and the application itself. So I wanted to know, is there a way to reinstall ablecommerce and reload the work I have done? I added 1,000 products already and edited the theme. I don't mind if the theme doesn't come back, but the products is what I am worried about. They took 5-10min each and I have no idea how to bulk upload them! Also, I did get some errors during installation (5, I think) and they may have contributed to why it is loading so slow. Any other reasons it could be?

Thanks in advance!

[William M]

19 seconds on Fios.

[combra]

Hopefully, this is the right topic to post this in. My website (carpartscentral.com) is loading really slow sometimes. Usually in the mornings and the evenings, it takes around 10-15sec. to load! That is more then enough time for someone to deteriorate away thinking the website doesn't work. I contacted Rackspace, who is hosting it, and they said to change it to integrated mode rather then classic, in which they did. It did get a little faster, but it is still lagging at times throughout the day. Still the same seconds. I know the server had more than enough bandwidth. Once the main page loads, everything loads quick which leads me to believe it is not the server and the application itself. So I wanted to know, is there a way to reinstall ablecommerce and reload the work I have done? I added 1,000 products already and edited the theme. I don't mind if the theme doesn't come back, but the products is what I am worried about. They took 5-10min each and I have no idea how to bulk upload them! Also, I did get some errors during installation (5, I think) and they may have contributed to why it is loading so slow. Any other reasons it could be?

Thanks in advance!

I'm assuming this is a brand new website with low traffic right? You can setup a program to ping your website to keep it from going to sleep, until you get enough traffic where you don't need that anymore.

-Brandon

[afm]

I use SmarterPing to keep low volume websites active,

http://www.smartertools.com/forums/t/14404.aspx

[freedom1029]

Wow indeed your site is very slow! Almost 60 sec to load the home page! I have the exact same problem with our store and the only response I got from AC was that my site was probably having a low visit rate causing it to be removed from the server cache.

I wonder if some type of server are worst than other(2003 vs 2008)?
Mine is hosted on 2003 with .Net 2.0 and it's darn it's slow!!! So slow that I taught that AC had to do something with this, or maybe bad communication with the db, who knows! I wish AC store had a self testing mechanism. It would be great to be able to pin point the problem if problem there is.

I use a free online service(http://host-tracker.com) that ping my site every 15 minutes, however to get the ping to a shorter period enough to make a difference(every 5 minutes or less) you have to pay for the service.

[kastnerd]

After browsing your site a little to make sure the server was awake. (use the ping tool to keep it awake 24/7)
I used this web tool. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
It shows you have large images,
One of your product thumb nails is 41k, I used photoshop and used the save for web export and put it at 60% and the photo still looks clean but is only 15.9k, You could batch optimize your images and re-upload them with out much work if you keep the file names the same and just upload the new ones on top of the old ones.

It says your page is 490101 bytes and 402578 bytes are images.