Slow on HostMySite.com

[heinscott]

Has anyone noticed a problem with speed on a hosted server? In house, my site runs great, but... online, I might wait up to 8-10 seconds for a product page to load. I have been in contact with the hosting company (which in this case is an excellent company) and they asked me:

I've noticed your running an encryption on your connection string every time you connect to your database. While although this is secure, is it set to have it decrypt each time before actually making the database connection?

I advise making sure the decryption algorithm is running smoothly.

We can setup a DSN connection for you here instead, if you wanted a more secure way of connecting to the database while not having to encrypt the connection string.

Has anyone experienced a problem like this before? I've tried connected directly to the hosted DB from my local install, too, and that is extremely sluggish, too... so, it seems that the problems resides in the db calls?

Any help that anyone could give me would be greatly appreciated!

Scott

[heinscott]

Can anyone help me with this? I need something to tell the hosting company concerning where the problem resides, so I know how to best resolve... An 8 second response time is totally unacceptable on a high traffic site! Here is the last correspondance I recieved from the hostmysite tech guy....

Hello Scott,


I monitored the activity on your database while browsing through your site. I was able to trap the queries for a single page request (Shop By Brand > Applied Biochemists) which resulted in about 500 rows. I exported the results of this into the table hms_trace on your database for your review.

Take note of the duration column, which shows how long each request takes. Most of the long running requests are marked as EventClass 15, which is an Audit Logout - meaning that your SQL user has logged off of the server (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175827.aspx). For each page that pulls from the database, there are over 100 connections being opened and closed to the database. This, along with the encryption/decryption is what is severely slowing down your site.

It seems as though there are two routes to improving your performance. One, you can remove the encryption from your connection strings. This would likely be the easiest change, and should provide a significant performance improvement. Two, you would adjust your code to maintain an active connection to the database while pulling information, and only close it once the page load completes. This would result in a single instance of encrypting the connection string, rather than 100.

Can anyone help me with this? Is it possible to de-encrypt the connection strings?? Help!!

Scott

[heinscott]

Could I get a developer to comment on these concerns, so I know how to approach my hosting company?

[jmestep]

You can use a non-encyrpted connection string by entering it into the admin-->Configure-->Security-->Database.
I'm going to try to run a trace on the db activity on a live site and see what I get- I'm curious.

[heinscott]

Thank you Judy...
I appreciate your help greatly.
If you find anything that could help me, I would really appreciate that info as well!


Scott

[heinscott]

My site (in production right now) is at 76.12.100.221
Could someone take a look at the response time and let me know if this is normal? HostMySite swears that it is a problem with the way Able opens database connections, and Able tech support has nothing to say.
I have to figure this out right away, or my boss is going to kill me!
Please help!!!

Scott

[jmestep]

I haven't been able to run a profiler on a live site with traffic because they are on a shared hoster and I can't access the database that way. I do know that when I have profiled an Able site in the past there were a lot of the kind of entries your hoster pointed out and I don't think it was a bad thing and performance was still great on those sites. I just can't remember why the events happen.
Compare this site with some traffic to your search page-- yours has 1116 items, this one has 3,547 items
http://www.directpaintball.com/Search.aspx
The site is a lot faster than yours. It's on Drundo.net and the plan is $89.95 a month- we don't need it that high yet, but I didn't know what traffic was going to be to start out. Yesterday's traffic was
2096 visits
31904 pages
138135 hits

Not really heavy yet, but still a live site.
The basic diffrerence I can see with your site is your top nav-- very nice, by the way-- but I don't think that would be causing it- ComponentArt stuff is supposed to be pretty fast. You might take if off to test.

[heinscott]

Thanks again for your help, Judy...
Yeah, we are paying like $30.00 p/month, so, maybe just a better server situation could be the issue. I have tried removing topNav... In fact, I went back to the original Able Theme, and still everything ran really slowly. So... Uggh...
We get like 2,000 visits a day, also, so... definitely need the speed. I would hate to have bounces as a result of this.
I'm still waiting to here back from HostMySite... They seem to finally agree that the problem in on their end.
Yay!

Thanks again,

Scott

[heinscott]

The problem has been solved... Apparently, my SQL server was being hosted on a different physical segment than my server. They have been moved to be on the same local network, and the speed issue cleared up immediately.
Thanks Judy, for your help!

Scott

[Mike718NY]

Your site is 100 times faster now than before.

Where did you get that top menu? Did it come with AC7?

[heinscott]

Yep... It's one of the ComponentArt features. You can get a good idea of how to use them, by going to their website at: http://www.componentart.com

I did have to do some modifications to get multiple columns to show in each drop down. If you don't need that particular feature, however, it is really easy to setup.

I believe the tag is <ComponentArt:Menu>

Hope this helps!

Scott