I've noticed that after 5 or so different items are added to a cart, site performance begins to drop in a noticable way for that visitor. After about 20, it becomes horrible. And after 50...


This is an issue for me because our customers tend to order a bunch of stuff at one time to save on shipping.



perfmon on the web server shows that it is being taxed pretty heavily (% processor). The SQL server also shows heavy taxing. And the bandwidth passing between the the two servers is large.



I'm going to upgrade the SQL server this weekend with another processor.



Has anyone else noticed this? I would have expected some degradation, but not this much.



Another performance problems I've noticed is some product pages will tax the database server a lot more than others. It seems the product pages that have existed on the site since before SP1 are most affected. The more recent addtions (since SP2) are fine.



Also, now that our customer database has grown to several thousand, browsing for them in the admin is slow as molasses.



Any comments or advise appreciated.

Some of the products have choices, five different sizes for example. I'm not sure if that's a lot.

Webserver is a dedicated 2.8 ghz single xeon with 1 gb ram. I ordered 2 more gb of ram and will have it installed tonight. Another processor is also on its way, should be installed by mid-week.

SQL server is dedicated, with a pair of 2.8 ghz xeons, and 3 gb ram.

Traffic isn't too heavy. The site probably averages 10 simultaneous visitors, and about 20 at peak times. About 20% of those are SSL sessions.

Cart page is unmodified, except through the CSS. Users aren't taken to the cart page though when adding an item. I set it up that way because most of the customers continue shopping.

Since the post above, I've enabled product caching which has cut down on the database traffic.

Also, I reduced the gzip compression level through iis metabase. It was set at 9, and I reduced it to 5. That really seems to have helped reduced the page generation time as well as processor time. I'll continue experimenting.

Ok here is my test on our site.

I realize the product choices are rather simple in nature. I only tested the latency on items in our merchandise section, mostly T Shirts and Jerseys which are available in several sizes and 3 and 2 colors respectively.

I did notice a decrease in response time between 15 and 30 items in the cart. As I got closer to 30 my latency grew to about 1.5 - 2 sec. On occasion it pretty close to instant but that was rare. While I had the 30 items in the cart I tried paging to other pages and didn't see any abnormal lag.

I would suggest try our site at www.laurastamm.net and see if you have a problem. If you still have the problem it might be local issue. If not try it on some other sites that are hosting on Resposio. Just click on the ad above and see if you can duplicate it on some other more complicated sites on Noah's servers.

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Bob Noble

hey newuser, is there any chance we can get a link to your site?

For what its worth, I just played around with adding items on my site and found no noticable performance issues when 50 items were added to the cart. Our site is actually only run on a dedicated virtual server with similiar traffic patterns that you have, so I have a feeling something on your server is configured wrong. One thing I would definitely check, especially if you have a developer copy of the software is that you do not have the site configured for debug mode and the compiled dlls (only appplies if you have developer and reocmpiled yourself) were compiled for release. A debug compile can add some serious overhead to the processing times.