BV5 - SP3, all hotfixes. Customer is having alot of trouble ONLY when a visitor has a large number of items their cart. When the item qty hits the mark of 8 or more, page loads really slow down; at 12 items plu, it crawls. Not a problem with server hardware - there's hardly any CPU being utilized, and plenty of resources remaining.

In addition, customer has Manual CC chosen for payment, and these large carts error out on the payment step also.

Any one else seeing this?

Carts with a small qty of items fly thru.

I'll add to this that many of the products on this site have customer choices with them. Problem seems to be worse when choosing these custom-choice products, and not as bad when choosing simple items with no choices, although it still exists.

Yeap. Same here. Actually if you add some marketing sales/promotions to several of your products the performance drops few times more as most of the tests are done in code in long loops and not in SQL.
I've been trying to perf test SP3 for a while now but had hardly any time to do it. Viewstate usage is another item discussed so many times. Some of us modified our own sites to drop the viewstate but I think a change from BV is required and not from each of us. I can't install SP3 at all as I have to many customizations done to drop the viewstate and increase performance.

Thanks for the replies - this explains a lot. We ONLY upgraded to SP3 on this store to fix a PayPal issue where state sales tax was not being passed to PayPal in SP2; if I would have known this, I may have advised customer differently, especially RIGHT BEFORE THEIR MAJOR HOLIDAY PROMOTIONS! This is a serious flaw in the programming and does need a resolution for it ASAP.

It may be too late to save this customer - she's already said she's shutting the site down as she's at her last straw (there have been several bug issues with BV5 that took a long time to get release fixes for that have affected her store's ability to work for her as intended). It's a black-eye on our part, as we advised her to go with BV over another competitor.

But maybe we may be able to save our other BV5 customers who are not as affected by this and still have a little patience with things.

I know slow page loads for large carts were discussed before with the suggestion to trim viewstate. Cornelieu got to the heart of the problem, looping in the code versus SQL. Even 80kb won't slow down a broadband connection, it's the programming itself that causes the huge delays.

This will take a significant programming change to the cart which I don't see happening really fast. Hopefully they can do a rollup for Sp 3.5 sometime in January. I'm a little depressed today having gone through the holiday promotion season with major cart abandonments because of some of these issues. This one is not nearly as large for us as is the uneditable cart issue with custom urls.

Together though they make our sites collectively less appealing for users. Hopefully this will be a BV priority next week.

Noah,

Thanks for the tip. Will try this today and see how it goes. This still would not resolve the issue of the errors on checkout when a large basket is in use however.

Actually never had a complaint about this until AFTER 3.1 -- this morning. I wonder if something changed to slow things up.

It's REAL slow..this isn't a gripe it's almost unusable as the first poster states. The threshold seems to be 5 products with options, beyond that it can take a half minute between clicks. Noahs fix works, but having to wait 30 seconds to get to the cart when they are done shopping will likely only prolong the inevitable abandondment of the cart until that point.

As long as it's fixed everyone is happy, that's all we can ask. The old saying applies, measure twice cut once, would rather have it done right the first time.

This gets even worse -- if the cart gets so large - I was just putting an order through for a customer and was adding the last item (count of 50) total cart contents has probably 300 items -- it times out and errors back to the default.aspx page -- it will not allow you to enter any more items to the cart. Since it errored, I can't even go back and edit the order -- have to start from scratch, not sure if I can even get the order through.

My "large" orders are rare, but I wonder how many aren't completing shopping.

Just to bring you up to speed on the issue. Right now we are still pinpointing the exact cause. Our leading theory is that a number of items are not getting cached correct so there are more database calls than needed to display the line items in the cart. We've been looking at SQL traces and the evidence appears to backup our theory.

We're hoping the issue can be fixed fairly quickly with a core patch that will correct cache items during cart loads.