Cannot login to merchant / admin area

[VIPER7]

I am having a problem logging into my merchant / admin area. When I try to login, and provide my credentials, I get the "Processing" message that comes up (with spinning wheel) and then it just returns me to that page, without logging me in. What could be the problem here? I've tried rebooting, recycling the app pool, dedicating an app pool to my site, etc. etc. I don't get any sort of error message, the "Processing" / spinning wheel just goes away after a minute and returns me to the login page, without logging me in. Help!

[Katie]

I can't say that I've seen this problem before. Have you tried going directly to the admin URL?

It should be something like 'my-store.com/admin/default.aspx' where you just need to append /admin/default.aspx to your store domain. If the login was unsuccessful, then you should be seeing an error message indicating just that.

[VIPER7]

I get this same behaviour at the direct URL:

http://www.drumcityguitarland.com/admin/login.aspx

except the spinning wheel never occurs. It just sits there and goes no where.

[Katie]

Sorry, I don't really have any ideas except that you locked yourself out. But you should see some error if that were the case.

Based on the fact you were able to login to your site on Wednesday, what has changed?

I have to say that you have so many issues going, that it starts feeling like you have some larger issue that needs to be found. I am not sure what that is yet, but in my experience, it generally requires a high level support technician who will need to get remote access to the server and start troubleshooting. You may consider purchasing some priority support time, and see if we can get this working before the weekend.

[VIPER7]

Hi Katie,

I hear what you are saying. I do have a lot of issues going on with this site. Do you have any other customers using AC Gold (that you know of) that have tens of thousands of users per month and millions of page views from around the world?

[Katie]

Well, it's not easy for me to track something like this, but yes, I know that there are some high profile sites using AbleCommerce. I cannot disclose the names though. You also have to keep in mind that a super busy store will need to be backed up by some powerful servers. You should have a dedicated webserver and dedicated SQL server with lots of RAM and processing power on each.

One thing you can try to get logged in is documented at the bottom of this page -

http://help.ablecommerce.com/mergedProj ... policy.htm

[VIPER7]

Another thing I can tell you Katie is that we used to run this site, for many years, on AC 5.5 (.Net) and never had a single lick of problems (other than occasional anomalies), with the same load. Now that we have switched to AC Gold, we've had nothing but problems. At this point, I think my customer would give anything to go back to 5.5, now that he is no longer receiving orders in his AC shopping cart. I have never had a problem running both the site and the SQL Server on the same server. Maybe it's time to rethink that strategy, and at this point, I am re-thinking / considering much of the infrastructure requirements and strategy to run and maintain a high volume AC site. A lot of people purchase AC in hopes they will have a successful e-commerce operation, but we are well beyond that and now our hope is to be able to get our store back up and functional. I need to figure out a way to post a message on our site that informs customers they can only phone in their order at this point as the cart / checkout functionality is non-existent. Sorry to sound frustrated but I am exhausted in my efforts, and trying to juggle a lot of client issues like this for my client base at the moment. Not enough hours in a day! Thanks for listening!

[Katie]

AbleCommerce Gold has a lot more features that 5.5. In particular, I am concerned about your settings for anonymous users and activity logging. If you can try to get logged in, then we can look at the amount of information being stored in the database to see if this is the underlying problem. If you have hundreds of thousands of records built up, then the automated maintenance routines are going to have some trouble completing the request.

I've been trying to help, but there is only so much that can be done through the forums. I still suggest that you purchase some time and we can have an experienced server technician login and try to see what could be going on. If you are using the later versions, then you should not be having these issues.

[VIPER7]

Hi Katie,

Thanks! I can tell you I currently have over 2,000,000 db entries in my PageViews table and over 87,000 entries in my Users table. I would love to just be able to delete all of these from the database manually in SQL. I would also like to turn off anything that logs or creates unnecessary entries in the database, other than customer orders. How much would it cost to have AbleCommerce take care of this for me?

[Katie]

Holy smokes! That would explain why the site is having some trouble. Every time you go to login, the maintenance routine is trying to run, and it just can't archive that number of records. If you can, disable Activity logging from the Configure > Store > Page Tracking page right away. Just uncheck the box and save. I wouldn't try removing the records from this page because it really needs to be done manually - and in batches.

If you want to purchase an hour of support time, we can login to the database server and get this cleaned up. After that, the site should be running good in no time. You can find the link from this page - http://www.ablecommerce.com/Software-Support-C112.aspx

You can provide your SQL server remote access information in the order notes.
Thanks!

[VIPER7]

I finally figured out how to restore my admin access back into AC Gold! I deleted ALL database entries in the ac_PageViews table and walah! I was able to login to my site. With this said, I was then able to go to my settings in the admin and figure out what was going on. My site was set to delete page views after 30 days... a value WAY too long for a high traffic / volume site. This should really be changed Katie. Suffice it to say - I believe I run the highest volume site of anyone using AC Gold. Otherwise, this would have been discovered sooner. Either that, or other high volume AC Gold site owners already adjusted this value to a minimum amount. I changed my value to 3 days and may just turn it off as I see it completely unnecessary. Anyway, I am learning the hard way on how to optimize AC Gold in a high traffic environment.

[rmaweb]

We've had ours set to 4 days for years, and recently changed it to 1 day for the customer's sake while they are browsing the site to be able to see which product they had just viewed. Otherwise, we use google analytics and can see more info their anyways as to which pages are popular.

[Katie]

The default value to store page views is 7 days. The default value to store anonymous users is 30 days. You can use the Check Database feature and see if that might need to be adjusted to a lower value.

Can you please give us some details about your server? You said that you have the webserver and SQL on the same server, so -

- How much memory and processing power does this server have?

- Have you taken a look at the performance monitor to see if you have memory free and that the CPU isn't being pegged?

- What version of SQL server are you using (not Express I hope), and what is the size of your database?

Now that the maintenance isn't an issue, then you should be able to get some accurate information and answer these questions.

[VIPER7]

I'd say 4 days is a pretty good strategy! Certainly couldn't see needing to retain this data for any longer than a single digit value, and even at that, seriously consider your daily activity!

[VIPER7]

Katie - I've got a beefy server... Dual procs - Intel Xeon E5520 @ 2.27GHz (shows 16 cores in Perf Mon), 12GB RAM, Lots of HD space, Win Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, etc. etc.

Current size of my DB is 2GB but that's before I started doing all this cleanup. My DB has been over 60GB when using AC 5.5. Now that I've done the cleanup, need to perform shrink ops.

Stats in perf monitor are nowhere near capacity. I believe my server resources are adequate.

The main piece of information I have been able to gleen from all this is that if you have your page views set to 30 days and have over 2,000,000 records in your PageViews table, you will be stuck in a hurry, not being able to login, customers cannot login / place orders, etc.

My environment is getting much more stable with all this in mind! I'm now deleting anon users older than 3 days!

[Katie]

Thanks for the update. I'm really hoping that everything will be working smoother from here on out. Please keep us updated if you run into any problems.

I will try to put together a FAQ which will have some recommended settings for a high traffic site. Our default settings are based around the typical site, which may not be appropriate in some cases.

Katie

[abradley]

I just wanted to say I look forward to that FAQ! Sounds like it will help with some of our issues as well.