Before you read this post, please know I am not affiliated with Able Commerce other than that I have used the software for years for some of my clients and have a very busy / high traffic site specifically that runs Able Commerce Gold. With that said, I wanted to share my experiences on optimizing Able Commerce Gold over the last few weeks, in hopes it will benefit someone for a successful experience with Able Commerce.
Getting down to the nuts and bolts of it, if you are running significant volume on your Able Commerce Gold site, one of the first things you are going to want to do is minimize Page View logging and Anonymous users. In my particular case, we launched with Able Commerce Gold (after cutting away from Able Commerce 5.5) and quickly found ourselves in troubled waters after our Page View log had filled to over 2,000,000 records and over 87,000 anonymous users (in less than 30 days). With this amount of volume, it rendered our interaction with the database unusable. No one could purchase, log in, create new accounts... we were even locked out of the admin. Our fix was to first go in and delete all of the Page Views in our database manually. This alleviated some of the problem, enough so that we could then get logged back into the admin and start making more adjustments to minimize unnecessary data from being written to the database, specifically, anonymous users. We now have our Able Commerce configured to delete anonymous users after 2 days and are not logging Page Views at all. All of this is configurable via the AC admin interface (Configure > Store > Page Tracking and Configure > Store > Maintenance). This is the biggest thing you can do to help yourself IF you run a high volume website, as we do, running with Able Commerce Gold).
The comments above are relevant to this specific build of AC:
AbleCommerce for ASP.NET
VERSION: 7.0.86.6169
Release Label: GoldR6
We are planning on upgrading to the new release, which we understand is out, now just to find some time. We'd like to keep our site up and running for a while now as our website visitors have experienced a couple days of downtime as a result of the inherent problems stated above, which are now fixed.
If you have followed this forum for any length of time, you know its the first place I come to report problems and I realize I can get quite frustrated when things aren't going right. I'm not the savviest tech around but have a knack for troubleshooting and poking until problems get resolved. Personally, given AC's tenure, I believe the problems stated above could have been avoided with more solid programming (or perhaps, in the very least, a little foresight with default settings) on the back end. I am not pointing fingers but I would certainly like to see more attention paid to real world high volume scenarios in case anyone in the same situation finds themselves stuck as a result of these cases not being fully explored and tested prior to releasing an otherwise very well thought out software. Able Commerce is very good in most areas. I just don't think anyone is running the same type of volume as I am with my Able Commerce store, otherwise, this probably would have been discovered sooner... at least with Able Commerce Gold anyway.
Thank you to everyone in this forum for listening and helping... Katie, Judy, Mike, etc. etc. you know who you are. Have a great, happy and safe 4th of July holiday everyone! Rock on!
Dennis St. John
Webmaster for Drum City Guitarland
http://www.drumcityguitarland.com
Wheat Ridge, Colorado