Don’t expect this site to say anything directly about the clients I’m working with. My personal views are just that – personal. What you can expect are my views on technologies, techniques, futures, and general observations on the computing world around me.
Currently, I’m working inside a site where a previous developer made some fairly poor choices. I’ve been adjusting code to make the frakkin thing work right. It’s not the host. It’s the shopping cart.
I wrote a quick test script in PHP to perform 10 tests of 4,000 database operations. Across the tests, I get a result of about 1.6 seconds for the 4,000 operations. I’d consider the host pretty good for that. In fact, my own host company averages 5.4 seconds for the same test.
What’s annoying me about the cart? The amount of time it takes to load.
Ok. I’ve ruled out that the server is to blame. I’ve ruled out the database is overworked. There have been a few page loads of this cart that run up to 1.6 minutes. It’s amazing. Really.
I’ve contacted the cart’s vendor and their only suggestion for speeding everything up is to move web hosts. They would gladly host the site for my customer for a measly $20/mo. There was no mention of how to speed up the cart on a server that’s not theirs.
So… the logic is, if the host has any sort of load on it, the cart will be slow. Move it to a really really fast computer with nearly zero load (i.e., nobody is doing anything at all on it), then the cart should be fast enough.
Yes, that’s true. It will. I’m testing the cart at midnight and it is nice and fast. During peak hours, however, it gets bogged down because of how much processing it’s doing in the background.
Did I say midnight? Oops. Time to log. I’ll write some more tomorrow about how this cart was made. For programmers, the key phrases are “macro vs micro.”