Hi all,

Having a bit of an issue with my virtuemart store.

Firstly excuse the content if you do go in and have a look, its a rather risque client of ours.
111.223.236.34/~trebor/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=18
You might have to cut and paste this link rather than clicking on it....

Basically, we have used CSVI to upload a wholesalers product list to the site.
We got roland (who made the component) to help format the csv file that we were provided with.
It has uploaded correctly however when you click on one of the categories it can take up to 30 seconds to load the list of products in that category. (even if there are only a couple of items).

We made our own test category "TEST01" at the bottom of the page. This was created inside of virtuemart and loads straight away.

All the image files are loaded externally, but they seem to load quite quickly, its more actually waiting for the product items page to load that takes the time.
What is the best way to test what is happening with the slow load times?

Also we have the store hosted on a VDS with Micron21 so speeds should be good server wise.

Any help or expertise would be appreciated.


Cheers,

Ant. S

Hey Ant,

We had a similar issue with VM sometime back but Paul isn't available till Monday so touch base with me if you don't get sorted over the weekend. I can get some sort of direction from him for you then.

Cheers

Shane

Have you tried the Firefox Add-on YSlow?

I tried one of the pages and YSlow provided a heap of info you could look at. I'll email you then printout.

Pete

Hi Pete and Shane,

Paete I will add that plugin on Monday and have a squiz at the info.
Shane I will definitely contact if we arent able to resolve.

Thanks so much gents, as always you are goldmines of information!!


cheers,

ant.

hmmm, I had a little look around and it looks like something is slowing down the render of the page.

All the assets are loading at a good speed. Just the actual render index.php took longer than 45 seconds.



I'd turn debug mode on and try and rip it apart to see what exactly is slowing it down. Must be some crazy DB query

Morning Ant,

Paul had a quick look for you this morning and gave me a couple of things you might want to look at -

There are JavaScript scripts in the head which could be located at the bottom of the document.
Need to add Expires Headers - Plenty of components which require attention
Way too many http requests - files should be combined or make multiple scripts into one.
Components can be zipped up - Assists with faster browser and load times.

Let em know how you get on

Cheers

Shane

MOD: Moved to Help And Troubleshooting (more answers?)

You really should start on the related Component forums Ant rather than here... all my VM questions have either ended up answered on forum.virtuemart.net or I've ended up going back there and posting my solution so others can solve their issues in the future.

NAUGHTY NAUGHTY NAUGHTY - And not just the subject matter of the site.

You're loading your images from elsewhere instead of having local images on your server. PERFORMANCE BOMBS!!!! That's related to the other site's performance in addition to your own. VM loads the images for products using PHP calls to render some of the image properties on the fly. So if it's got to go and get an image elsewhere, and there's multiple images to get, then that's a no brainer of a starting point to fix it up.

Put the images locally and I would imagine perhaps help a bit... your test category has no images for products, so is faster as it's not going elsewhere. You might find that simply locating the images locally is better practice and it loads faster. Nonumber.nl has a CDN extension too that you could use to have images load on a subdomain to improve performance, but thats a topic for an MJUG in the future.


forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=65103.0 describes a tweak to change SQL to boost performance... might not be the first thing to try however as it's a VM core adjustment and it might also impact on multiple products.

My last VM store was greatly improved by a custom VM template being created rather than the default one that is frankly ugly and a bit of an underachiever. Turning ajax off in the template also is a good idea as it's never really gotten itself over the line as being cross browser compatible and consistently delivering.

Other things to turn off...
- You have akeeba lazy backup on... that's causing a load factor. Set up either Cpanel backups or a Cron job to trigger akeeba. www.akeebabackup.com/documentation/walkt...n-job-in-cpanel.html
- 14 CSS files are loading... making a template look pretty vs making it load fast are obviously two different things.
- Cosmetically, turn off the VM footer logos in VM setup. Though credit back to them is nice, do it on a credits page. Having it on the shopping page itself = red flag to shop hackers that they know what to go and try to break it. It's not happened to any of my VM shops, but it's certainly one less thing promoting an entry point.
- GZip compression on?
- Caching off? Or caching extension installed to turn caching off for VM?
- URL management? Looking close to launch, SEF is not on yet.

Hi All,

Firstly, apologies for lack of response to your post Patrick. I have been out of action for a bit.
On the virtuemart forum front, yes you are right, but I sometimes find the lack of response in there frustrating and love the super fast response from you guys and the fact that I can trust in the suggestions.
But I will post on their forum first from now on. I just shot a message up there today.

Getting the shots from the external site is a must, because the client wants to continually get new csv files as they are updated by the manufacturer (which will apparently happen on a regular basis). Also the thumbnails seem to load up quite quickly once the page opens, its just getting the page that contains the listing s of any particular category to open.

I hopped on the virtuemart site and checked out that post that you had the link to. It looked very promising as all the users described what seemed like the same problem, however I did not get any faster results when changing this code.

I loaded the standard milkyway template for the store, just to simplify things a bit for testing and then when through and switched off plugins, and additional components and played with cache and gzip settings. I did not notice any discernable difference.

So I am stumped still. I spent the better part of 10 hours today going through forums and testing different things out.

I am pretty hopeless in this area so I am keen to see how much it would cost for someone to work this out for me.
If anyone is interested and can give me a quote I would be interested to know how much it would cost. If it wont break the bank even better still.

Thanks again,

ant S.

Hey Ant,

I personally am hopeless with coding etc but Paul is brilliant. Uni students seem to be a mile in front of us all these days.

If you would like him to have a look we can see if he has any options etc. We had a really slow Virtue mart site about 18 months ago and he got that to fly. Pm me the logins if you want him to have a look or give me a call at the office and we can discuss options etc.

Glad to help if we can.

Cheers

Shane
PS I drink Red ! ! !

Hi Shane,

That would be great!! Thank you very much
I have an email address of yours and I will send it through to that (hopefully its the right one). Let me know if you havent received it by morning.

Cheers,

ant S.

Paul is casting his little peepers over it this morning. Will have a chat this afternoon @TheHub

Cheers

Shane

Thanks Shane,

Very much appreciated, I will see you at the Hub!!

Cheers,

ant S.

Ant,

Don't know if you fixed this yet, but while looking at the other post today about slow VM, I found this:

forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=69341.0 - Post 12.

As you're using externally hosted images, the three lines that get commented out in shop.browse.php are kicking in to determine the image size on the fly, which slows down the loading of pages.

Give it a go and see if that improves your speed.