Topic awaiting preservation: Slow website speed during searches & category browsing (speed tips!!!)

Hello,

I have a modified oscommerce website which works fine during checkout, going to the contact page, returns page, etc..., however, when it comes to navigating through the product categories or performing searches the website is extremely slow.

Here is some basic info about my website. The website is being hosted on a dedicated not a shared server; so there aren't any other websites being hosted on the server. I do have a lot of products around 60,000 in my "products" table in mysql; which is where I think my problem is with my category & search speed issues.

I've had programmers work on the website to increase the category navigation & search speeds; which helped a little but never got as fast as websites like amazon, buy, etc... Some things they told me they did was create indexes, query optimizations, and query caches.

I don't want to keep on spending money without getting the results I'm looking for when it comes to category navigation & search speeds. Is there anything else I can try doing to improve the performance of these 2 issues?? I will give anything a try because I know having a slow website is very annoying to customers.

Thank you,

olimits7

Ok... seems your programmers already covered 'the usual', though your description still very much sounds like a database problem.

Now let's do some digging together, shall we?
You say this is a dedicated server - is it administrated by you, or is it a 'managed' server.
Do you have access to phpmyadmin?
What logging is your shop doing?

Sorry I can't provide an answer straight away either - this can be pretty much anything from
'misconfigured ext3 file system', to 'badly set indices slowing mysql down', to 'keeping too much log information
where storing is is what's slowing it down...

So please be prepared for a serious round of questions-answers-more-questions-suggestions-check results-more questions...

So long,

->Tyberius Prime

Thanks for the reply, Tyberius Prime!! I really appreciate your help.

It's a 'managed' dedicated server and I have access to webmin, cpanel WHM, SSH/shell access, etc....

Yes, I do have access to phpMyAdmin.

I'm not sure if the shop is doing any logging. But if the server is logging I'm not familiar with what type of information is being collected.

It seems you are a very experienced with PHP programming & mySQL. How many years experience do you have working with PHP & mySQL??

Do you do any freelancing work?? If you do I can give you access to my website and you can analyze my website to see if there is anything that can be done to achieve the fast speed I'm looking for in searches & category navigation. If you do think you can achieve this speed increase, we can setup a project and come up with a fair price for this job.

Let me know what you think.

Thank you, again.

olimits7

Hello,

though I don't do any freelance work right now, I'm still willing to help,
just donate the proceeds to charity.

I've worked just a little more than half a decade with PHP & mySql now.

But before we tweak, we need a status quo documentation.
Can you send me the details to your shop (there's a send email link on the page that opens when you click on my name).


So long,

->Tyberius Prime