Why so slow and unstable?

[slinglings]

Hello, so we have a website (attachedtobaby.com) running AbleCommerce 7 and it tends to be very slow and inconsistent when it comes to the loading of pages. It seems that some pages get cached and load very quickly, but then others can take up to 15-20 seconds to display or we get a session timeout error. We don't have a dedicated server but are paying a LOT for our hosting... Our host is called Server Intellect and we don't have a basic account, we pay around $150/month for some kind of shared server. We have another Linux/LAMP/Cpanel website running free Zencart and hosting costs about $8 a monthly and the performance and stability absolutely blows away the experience we have using the expensive windows hosting and AbleCommerce. Some questions:

1. Does ablecommerce require a dedicated server with a lot of memory in order to perform well?
2. If no, does anyone have ideas about how we can diagnose/troubleshoot the poor performance we're having?

Not only is our AbleCommerce website dreadfully slow, but it tends to just crash really often. All the time we need to connect to the server and restart IIS in order to get it to respond. Offhand I can't remember the error that gets displayed when the site stops working (the website in question is mainly ran by my wife and so I don't use it very often).

Can anyone help? I'd very much appreciate any help.

[slinglings]

No one has any ideas? here's an error we frequently see when logging into the admin screen:

"'Validation of viewstate MAC failed" Does anyone have any idea about this error?

[afm]

I had no response because the question was so broad. I suspect people might have tips if you shared some specific details:

What version of AbleCommerce do you have?
What version of database server are you using? Has a database admin looked at tuning the database recently?
Is the database server on the same machine as the website? If not, is it on the same local network?
Has the website server been updated recently (i.e. does it have the latest patches from Microsoft)?

Have you spoken to Server Intellect support about the errors and followed their advice?

[mikek]

Hello,

AbleCommerce does not have any specific server requirements and is pretty well optimized compared to other asp.net shopping carts like AspDotNetStoreFront and BVCommerce. From our
experience with AbleCommerce is the I/O server performance that make difference not the amount of server memory and CPU.

If your server provider is using low performance SATA disks and shared MSSQL database you site will run slow. If the database is running on a shared mssql server you may get connection timeouts
and DataAccess layer exceptions. Another reason for slow site performance could be Application Pool memory restrictions set on the web server (if the server is a shared server with multiple sites running
on the same server).

We can help you with site migration under your own fully manged private dedicated Windows 2008R2 server instance and high performance 15K SCSI RAID array storage. We also perform site performance
and uptime monitoring for each site and are able to respond to site downtimes within 5min after the downtime.

[slinglings]

Thanks, it's a shared server and shared SQL Server 2005 database. So it sounds like your advice is that although AbleCommerce does not have any specific server requirements, that it really won't perform well without dedicated hardware for the server and database. Is that the general consensus here?

What's frustrating is that any cheap LAMP host (Linux, apache, mysql, php) and free shopping cart (like Zencart) works absolutely fine on most hosts which cost around $8/month. AbleCommerce isn't cheap, and the hosting we currently have (at $150/month) cost damn near TWENTY TIMES more than what our other host costs us.

Mikek, so what's it going to cost per month for the hosting you are suggesting?

[slinglings]

What's odd to me is that the performace is so inconsistent. For example this page routinely takes 30 seconds to load:
http://www.attachedtobaby.com/Hotslings-C36.aspx

While this page loads much more quickly:
http://www.attachedtobaby.com/Slinglings-C37.aspx

There's definitely something weird happening and I wish I could figure out what the issue was.
Our website content doesn't change very often, so I wish the website would just cache these pages and load them up quickly. Does AbleCommere cache webpages? Any way to turn this on?

[slinglings]

Update: I figured out what the cause of the inconsistency between the above 2 pages. One page was using the the "Recently Viewed" Conlib. Apparently this Conlib just doesn't work, at least not for our website. It was timing out consistently and it may even be the case that whenever this was accessed it was throwing our server into a bad state. As soon as I removed this Conlib, the performance improved significatly. I don't know offhand how many pages on our site were using this Conlib, but it's a pretty worthless feature anyway and I'm hoping that this was the cause of most of our problems. Thanks for all who responded.

[mikek]

AbleCommerce can also run on a shared asp.net hosting for $10/month and does not require dedicated server.
It really depends on what are you looking to accomplish with a particular online store and how serious is the business
running behind the store.

If it is a serious business and you have spent more than 10k on site licenses and development and spending at least few hundred on
marketing every month, then running your site on $10.00/month hosting will waste most of the development and marketing money spent.

On the other end if you are just looking to test a business idea or product without risking thousands of dollars going open source LAMP + $8.00/month
hosting makes perfect sense.

Enterprise level Ecommerce solutions start at $7,000 per processor + development and separate dedicated web and mssql servers cost.

http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver ... nsing.aspx

[jmestep]

If I remember correctly, you site was customized a couple of years ago by a previous owner/developer? I remember it because it was such a good looking site.
There might be some customizations that are causing it, but that would be hard to tell without a code review.
If you install YSlow in your browser, you can see what it taking a long time.
I just ran it and it said you had 12 javascript files totalling 214.9k and with 51 problems when I checked it on the YSlow tools tab with JSLint (it might show inaccurate results- I hadn't used it before).

[pongguru]

What have you found out?

I tested your site yesterday. I see that the site has some performance problem. You may have to look into these:

1. The performance at the back end. I suspect the way you have set up your category and the way you want to display all of them may be slowing down the loading. Assign the products to child categories only.

2. Are you missing any broken images on the site or the browser does not understand the format of it.

3. Optimize the theme. You can get rid of some js and css files that you don't want. None of the stable asp.net shopping cart I have used does not provide an optimized front end. You have to spend some money there and optimize it.