AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I have a production instance of AbleCommerce currently running Gold R1 B4194 (WAP version). We see excessive memory and CPU usage when a large number of visitors hit the site and I have been anecdotally told that the NHibernate implementation in this release was not optimal for performance.

Does anyone have documented evidence that this is the case and that moving to a later release has improved general performance?

It's hard to say if the issues you are having are specifically with NHibernate. I searched at help.ablecommerce.com and found only 1 documented bug report, and it had to do with Lucene search index updating. However, there are many issues that have been fixed since R1 was released August 30, 2012. You can go to help.ablecommerce.com and click on the Full Upgrades folder from the left-column. For each upgrade since R1, there is a change log linked at the top of the document. This will give you a detailed list of each bug fix, improvement, and feature added with each of these releases. I would definitely consider upgrading since R1 was the very first version of AbleCommerce Gold, and unfortunately, it's a bit buggy. I know that over the past 1+ year, we have been continually making performance improvements.

Let me know if you have any questions.

There is no change from R1 to the latest R6 as far as NHibernate is concerned. But I guess whoever told you so wanted to say that some of AbleCommerce code that used NHibernate was not witten in the most optimal manner. This is valid to certain extent because we have made a number of performance enhancements since R1 and some of those enhamcements included improvements in how NHibernate is used on some pages.

I can't say exactly why you see the excessive memory and CPU usage, but the improvements that have been made in recent releases are really worth considering for an upgrade. I would suggest that you go ahead and upgrade your store to R6. You will definately notice improvements in many areas.

The change I mentioned was because of a post from Logan in response to a post of mine.

....you are seeing the elimination of HQL, plus a few other tweaks!

It was because I had seen noticeable change in memory and performance in R3 when I watched local dev sites of mine.

OK. I see. Actually it is hard to remember everything all the way back to R1.