Performance in comparison.

I built my first very small test site on nopCommerce 2.8. At this point I am impressed with Installation procedure and with  templates flexibility and I am extremely disappointed with pages load speed. To rule out any questions regarding abilities of the server, processors, software, platforms etc., I compared this site with other sites running on the same server under same OS, IIS and same instance of MSSQL Server.  Here are the particular sites to compare:
www.homethangs.com built on custom ASP cart with MSSQL Server on backend, 250,000 products in about 300 categories. Any page, including filters and searches opens in a split of a second. Please check it out for yoursef
www.barefootfloor.com - same platform, 16 millions products in hundreds categories. Any page opens at average of half a second. Please check it out.
www.artofceramic.com  built on nopCommerce 2.8, 3500 products in 2 categories. Located on the same server. Running same instance of MSSQL. This site is 50 times smaller then homethangs.com and thousands of times smaller than barefootfloor.com  Site is horribly slow. First page if not cashed may take 10-15 seconds to open, filter and search pages a very slow as well. I read some posts on the performance issues on this forum. While some of the suggestions sound quite reasonable and relevant, they all talking about tuning of 10% here and 10% there.  For the site of this size database performance tuning, indexing etc.  is totally irrelevant, the site with just a few thousands items should work 20 times (not 20%) faster than it does even without any indexes at all. If anybody could refer me to to a site of reasonable size, built on nopCommerce 2.8 and  with fast speed, that would be very helpful. Also if anybody have any suggestion of what may cause such a miserable performance, please help me out.

Hello, I fully agree with you, even the nopCommerce is hundreds of times slower than its last version WebForms "aspx".

I'm currently using version 2.65 that I optimized.I am an advocate that performance should be the first concern of a store.

Once half a second may be the case whether or not to buy.

I had to move to a VPS server because of the poor performance of the store, now  is running fast, but how it could be faster?

Regards

I've also been disappointed by nop. As new releases come out performance gets worse and worse.

It's a shame that they don't make some serious effort to improve performance. I fear that if they continue this way they'll lose enough users that it won't be worth it to maintain and it'll disappear for good.

Here's to hoping.

I do not completely agree with you. Its true that its not optimized out of the box. But, nopCommerce can be optimized for speed. However, if you don't know where you need to look then you may be just wasting time. You need to spent time in analyzing the slow requests using professional tools and then come up with a optimized solution that executes faster.

We have build some performance optimization plugin and building few more that helps optimize nopCommerce. Look at here for more information. We'll be updating once we release plugins for 3.0.

Yes but this is a product that is nearly $600, ouch!

What they are saying is that it will put people off using it if the performance is dire from the outset.

I agree that it will put some people off but not all. There are plenty of people that optimize the code themselves for a start, others that throw hardware at it so it will work as designed.

Lets not forget Dot Net Nuke runs like a dead slug on Valium which is nailed to the floor and stuck in treacle but tens of thousands of people use it! so why not nopCommerce? and let me tell you it runs faster than DNN hands down.

The answer is get decent hardware and optimize it yourself a little (or pay a developer to do it), after all it is FREE!!!

JulianMummery wrote:

Hi, thank you for your comments. I would like to present you some points that might help you and other understand value of speed and performance. Hope it helps.

I agree, if you're a specialty store selling unique product in niche without any much online competition then speed doesn't matter a lot. However, what if you are selling a product in competitive market? If you're in a serious e-commerce business then you will have to take care of every metrics including Conversion ratio and Site Speed. And remember, site speed has positive impact on Conversion Ratio.. which is proved by many studies.

Imagine your competitor having a blazing fast website that loads in 2-3 seconds, and your site takes 6-8 seconds. It may not matter a lot if you don't measure the results. But if you measure the impact then only you will understand. These difference may directly affect your revenue and profitability and in the long term survival of your online business.

For example, ShopZilla reduced 3 seconds in their load-time which resulted in 25% more page views, 7-12% more revenue and the complete overhaul required 50% less hardware. That means faster websites = more revenue.

Also, have a look at this document by leader in Web Performance Monitoring Tools - Gomez  on Why Web Performance Matters which might help you understand why performance matter.

I would also like to share articles from Niel Patel's blog on How Load Time Affects Google Rankings and
How they increased direct traffic to the blog by roughly 2000 visitors a day by reducing load-time from 1.93 second to 1.21 second discussed in this article.

1.93 second load-time isn't bad, but still improving it helped them get 2000 additional visitors a day. Imagine an amount of traffic you will get by optimizing your slow e-commerce site speed!

Just like you, throwing more hardware for improving site capacity and performance is the recommendation we used to give to our clients earlier. But after we optimized it, we found that a highly optimized site takes lesser hardware resources and the yield is multiplied by many factor. The price you pay for the product saves you a lot of money in terms of server resources requirement you might need otherwise. We are just talking about savings from server hardware needs, and not looking at what you could earn with a faster site...

So that means, with the same server infrastructure you can serve more visitors with a faster response time. You are increasing the site capacity my friend without increasing your server infrastructure which is more costly.

Moreover, our performance optimization product are definitely not for those who have time and resources to optimize it themselves. It's for those internet retailers who are serious about business and value time and efforts they could save by using it. Because, to do it yourself you need understand hundreds of things in right way.. otherwise you might just waste time optimizing the things which might not required.

I am not against your opinion about our product, but just trying to explain why it matters, and how it can help you and others.

I request you to check our demo store which has more than 80,000 products. Most of the pages are generated and loaded well within a second.. actually it took only 150-250 ms to generate them even if the Solr Core is hosted on a remote server (on our Cloud Solr Server)! So if you host it on your server, then you can save another 100ms to 150ms!

I welcome you to try it yourself and see the difference for your site by requesting a free trial here: http://www.nopaccelerate.com/. I'm sure you will love it.


Thanks

nopAccelerate.com

I agree with jariwalakrunal. It's an indisputable fact that performance matters.

I would like to try your product with nop 3, and happy to pay a price which seems to be reasonable looking at what you have developed. You must have invested a lot of time in your research.

Does it work on localhost for a project that is under development? I would like to test. What other service you offer? I would like to proceed with the order if it does what it promise.

I think, that main point missed in discussion. When page loads for 2 sec, and you pushing for 1.5, then we are talking about improving of performance. When it takes 20 seconds to load page first time and every click on filter freezing website for another 20-30 seconds, then we are talking either about bugs or about fundamentally bad product. That cannot be improved, that can be only fixed. About hardware: two quad machines (web and db servers)  with 16 GB memory each should be more than enough for this site to leave hardware issue alone.

I have the same performance bug.  It is definitely not a fine tuning issue.

Version 2.65 loads our largest category with 70 products (this category is set to show all products on one page) in 3-4 sec.  (but after about 2 sec the page is already responsive with only some product pictures lagging behind and loading at the end of the page)

With the very same database (converted to 3.0) on the very same server this category with 70 products loads in 21 sec in version 3.0.  (in the first 18-19 seconds nothing happens at the client browser), this delay makes the site unusable.

I tried a suggested workaround (it was rather a test) found in another topic (for 2.8 there was a similar problem) to switch off all discounts globally, this helped to bring the load time down to half, ie. 10-11 sec.  However it is much better, but anything above 4-5 sec is not less unacceptable, and I would also lack all the discount system in this case.