Topic: oscommerce pictures load slowly

[markehle]

Hello, Folks -

I am running SME 6.01 and am trying to get up an oscommerce web site - brendasbars.com. I am hosting this site at home on my DSL line, 3meg dl and 1.2meg up.

It loads the text fairly quickly, but the pictures load super slow - sometimes they just don't finish. They are not that big, and considering my connection, it should not be as slow as it is. My webmail performs ok, and when I ssh into my box, it shows a load average of 0.02, 0.02, 0.00, etc.

Does anybody know what to look for? I don't notice anything abnormal in the httpd error log.

Thanks -

Mark

[icpix]

Mark----

It's probably an osCommerce thing;~/ Might get better when the next version is run out, then again it might not. However it's been so long coming... I ditched over 2yrs work on osC I got so fed up. I found the osC 'technology' somewhat dated and I'm not even a programmer.

My product (per se) is pictures which, as you've spotted, osC doesn't do all that well. You've got to reduce both the size and quality of your thumbnails - hard but true;~/ Your popups (some people disable them) are only 60k but I used to run out 175k 'full size' pix quicker. There's some tweaking you need to do in that area for the code, Firefox shows them without the bottom sixth (OK in M$IE)

Maybe your DSL link has some bandwidth throttling (at the ISP). Metaphoric question;~)

I used the contribution 'OnTheFly_GDThumbs_1_5'. With this and osC in general I found the CPU Utilisation was drastically impacted;~| I needed to generate dynamic images as I have so many pictures. For your product range you would benefit greatly from actual cache I would have thought. Investigate the various other picture generator contributions that favour cache.

If you're on your own server then I strongly urge you to get to grips with one of the PHP accelerators... though this is a tough somewhat esoteric field. Works though;~) It'll work rather better for you as you've a limited product range.

FWIW I gave up on osC and returned to the Gallery fold when their own new version was published (G2). In sheer speed...
http://icpix.co.uk/main.php?g2_view=updates.ShowUpdates
...and CPU Utilisation terms G2 makes mincemeat of osC and in a far nicer fashion too. However the 'shopping cart' is largely in-and-out of development. It was the definitive absence of a reasonable shopping cart which was my original reason for changing horses those years back! G2's search functions are not a patch on osC's either;~/

----best wishes, Robert

[markehle]

Thanks for the reply. I am using the Image Magic contrib that is on the oscommerce site. I can't believe that the stock package does not have some sort of thumbnail system. The contrib helped a lot, but it is still slower than I expected. I will look into a PHP accerator, too.

Oscommerce is not nearly as easy to "hop up" as SME is. A lot of the contribs there break other ones. It is really hard to keep track of them all, and big contribs that make you edit many of the php files are just a real pain to install, especially if you have a lot of others installed, too, and the line numbers in the instructions don't match your files anymore. Some of the contribs are excellent, though, and really should be folded into OSC. Sadly, their forums are next to useless to search.

I am becoming suspicious of my DLS provider. The site speed varies a great deal for no apparent reason. When I asked for a static IP they did gave me one, but said, "now, don't go hosting anything!". I am thinking that, dangit, I pay a lot for those bits, I should be able to use them however I see fit! Maybe they are onto me.

Thanks again,

Mark

[djhomeless]

A couple of questions, is OSC creating the thumbnails on the fly or are they cached? Also, how many pictures/thumbs do you have on any one page?

I tend to agree with Robert about OSC as a technology. They haven't had a release in quite a while, and it seems the biggest benefit to the platform is the myriad of contribs that are stacked on top. Have you checked out Zenand Cubecart? Zen is a fork of OSC from many years ago, and has maintained a steady stream of releases. Very full featured, if you check out their forums you will find a load of OSC refugees. I mention CubeCart (even though it costs $80) because it has the best xhtml template I've ever seen (in an e-commerce setup anyway). This is very important because you want clean and efficient pages, not a lot of bloat. Zen has experimental xhtml template, but from what I understand it took close to a year to perfect. What does that tell you about their templating architecture?

If your not sure about the root cause of your problem, then simply logon to your box as root and run "top". Top should show you the processes running on your box (CPU & Memory). Then go to your site. If you see a lot of imagemagick processes spawning off, then it means OSC is creating the thumbs on the fly. If you see a few Apache processes, or no change at all, it might mean your ISP has some sort of throttling on images. Though, to be honest, I've never heard of any ISP doing that sort of thing (but you never know!).

Good Luck,

Geoffrey