Improve performance for 2.65 site - $100 reward

Hi

I have a site built in 2.65, the only modifications to the back-end has been adding a few new fields to the products table, nothing else. The site has been heavily customised on the front-end, which really shouldn't affect the site performance, but something, somewhere is making the site run slowly on our production server.

I don't think its the nop software in general (or our server), because I loaded the nop demo site onto the same server & this runs very well, much like the demo on the nop site.

So what is making my site run slowly? well if you can figure this out I will pay $100 to whoever successfully finds a solution.

The site has around 300 products (using SQL Compact db) and is using seven spikes plugins; product filter (see a category page) & nav (top menu drop downs), apart from that it is a standard installation of nop 2.65.

this is the site on my preview server:

http://bsc.vanderlyle-geek.co.uk.temporary-domain.com

the main pages that are too slow tend to be the category pages, but again the nop demo site seems to run much better.

Thanks
Kevan

Make sure you compile in release mode is VS.

Start up time is quite slow.  Remove any plugin folders that you don't need

Check your web.config and be sure that you don't have debugging enabled
       <compilation debug="true"
      
You have product counts in the Category list.  Disable that to see what effect it has.
(And since you have the Categories in the footer, that makes it even slower to load a page)

Please see these results

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121021_FT_2NY/3/details/

You have some resources in rd that are not found, and one big issue is the size of your slider

http://bsc.vanderlyle-geek.co.uk.temporary-domain.com/Themes/SkinCare/Content/images/HomeSlider/2.png

On your image files convert them to .Gifs or or use .png with some websnap used in Photoshop to reduce any unnessary colors.  

Going to All Settings in admin and finding ImageQuality setting, and changing it to 85% will help while keeping most of the image quality.  You'll have to clear your thumbs image folder after to get new thumbs that are compressed.  

Another I do, is use a CDN for all your image files and scripts.  

The CDN is a little tricky for the images, and I can go into detail in another post if you wish.  

My website, www.happycoral.com is very image intense, so this improved the speed by quite a bit.

New York wrote:

Hello,

How do you "Remove any plugin folders that you don't need"?

Do you just look at Administration->Configuration->Plugins and look for any Plugin that is marked as False in the Installed column?

Then just delete the corresponding folder?

Thanks,
Tony

You can certainly delete the corresponding folder for those that are not "installed".  Additionally, you can first uninstall the ones you know you don't need (though you may want to keep some you might use in near future - like discounts).
I do vaguely recall, though, that you should NOT delete all Tax Providers, or it could cause a problem - just leave one.

(The above is probably the correct way to do it, but I've found that I was also just able to delete the folders.  Uninstall removes the plugin-specific db tables and settings.  I think having them left around won't really hurt.)

So I should not uninstall the not used Plugins?  Just delete the folders.

Is it the folders in Deployable\nop_2.65\Plugins?

Thanks,
Tony

Yes, that's the correct folder.
As per above, uninstall is the "clean" way to do it, but I don't think it's necessary.
(There is also an InstalledPlugins.txt file in \App_Data; but  the plugin loader looks in the plugin directory to determine what to load, so if it's not loaded, then it won't appear in Admin > Config > Plugins anyway)

After doing some tests, I've found the category pages to be the slowest, with loading times around 5-9 secs, which is just  too long.

These pages have less than 50 products & only display 12 products per page.

anybody got any other suggestions on improving the category pages?

Thanks for your input guys, but I have managed to find & fix the problem...

The category pages were loading around 6-9 secs, which was way too long & after a few late nights I've managed to move my database from SQL Compact to SQL Server 2008, doing this allowed me to use the stored procedure (that comes with the nop installation) to run the Product Search, this has greatly improved load times, which are now around 3-5 secs, much better.