Site uploading at snails pace!

[paul in london]

Our main site Flooring Sales was always a fairly large site, we recently merged it with our tool site, so now it's a very large site indeed - the problem now is that it can take up to THREE HOURS to publish to web if we make large changes, for which we are making many... we've cleaned out the customer accounts, deleted old orders and compact the database every time we shut down. I'm currently going through and pruning the sites images, making them smaller or removing if duplicated etc. Are there any other tricks out there or an explanation (besides the sites size) that could be slowing it down?!

Help would be much appreciated!

- Suzy

[Mike Hughes]

How much memory does your computer have? If only 2GB then an upgrade to 4GB might help. It also might be worth getting a faster PC if yours is a bit behind the times.

My site is 1,500 products /pages and a full refresh takes about 2 minutes on a mid-range i5 processor.

Mike

[NormanRouxel]

No able to answer your main question but I noticed your NorList menu isn't overlapping the main menu as neatly as it could. Try this:

Edit listmenu_b.css (in your Site folder and look for the declaration

.menulist ul {

Somewhere below it is:

left: 168px;

Change to:

left: 205px;

[paul in london]

2 minutes! Wow.. yeah just checked and this one's only got 0.99 GB! Might have something to do with it! Shall swap it for one with 2 GB, if there's a dramatic improvement then maybe it would be worth getting 4 GB, thank you!

And thanks Norman, will adjust it when I get a chance

[fergusw]

Solid State Hard drive machine with at least 4Gb of RAM makes the world of difference.
Have you identified how many products/sections your website has? Would be good to know to assist in benchmarking various site sizes and hardware and performance.

[Mike Hughes]

solid state hard drives certainly make the pc very whizzy but some upload tests I ran before / after SSD showed very little difference in upload time.

4GB is only about £30 on amazon. Memory makes a huge difference in speed for pcs. 1gb is definitely too little.

Mike

[NormanRouxel]

Don't forget that Publish (or Refresh) is dependent on outside factors like your Internet connection's upload speed. This is often significantly slower than the download speed (the main thing ISP's tend to advertise), so that may be worth checking.

If you do a full site Preview that will give some indication of the time SellerDeck needs to work it's way through the site without uploading anything.

[fergusw]

Solid State Drives have been a revelation for me personally, coupled with about 8Gb of RAM.
For some sites we deal with it's not unusual to have databases of 10,000+ products/sections and the performance in processing, reading/writing to disk and in generating site for upload has been significantly improved with the SSD and 8GB memory.

Ultimately, as Norman says, it comes down to the software having to physically upload the files to the server. The slower the connection or the more files there are the longer it will take.
I'm assuming you have already optimised the compressed upload feature to get the fastest upload versus server performance?

[NormanRouxel]

Re SSD's: I've had them as the boot drive in 3 systems for about a year now and they certainly make a machine much faster.

As for RAM that 1Gb is way too little, so should be the first thing to be fixed.

[paul in london]

Thanks guys, the boss agrees it's time for an upgrade, Christmas has come early haha!

- Suzy

[paul in london]

Ok guys, back to the drawing board! We're on 4 GB now, and although it has improved slightly.. from 3 hours to 1.75 hours, I still think something more needs doing! Any thoughts?

[Duncan Rounding]

3 hours down to 1.75 is a big change but still a long time.

If memory serves me right (and please correct me if I'm wrong) I think that Actinic was only made large memory aware from v11 but there were some special builds of v10.

It might be worth getting a 64 bit machine with SSD and 8Gb RAM and contacting Actinic and see if they can give you a large memory aware build for v10 if it may help you - alternatively of course you could consider upgrading to v11.

Do you have a lot of product/section based custom variables that need processing for each page. These can add a large processing overhead as can some local php prcoessing depending on what it may be doing.

How many sections do you have and what is your ISP uplink speed?

[Mike Hughes]

How many pages are there in the site? that would give us something to compare against.

And what kind of processor does the PC have?

I would ask what part of the process is taking the longest time but I guess a couple of hours is a bit too long to sit there watching Sellerdeck do its stuff.

Mike

PS. I'd repeat what I said before about SSDs. They do make the computer much more responsive and faster for repeat drive accesses, but in back to back tests I ran of upload times before / after SSD there was very little difference between the time taken. This makes sense when you consider how small the actinic database typically is and I'd be surprised if it's not being accessed via a memory cache.

The processor does make a big difference though. The i5 I have now is rated about 22x faster than my old PC, partly because it's 4 core. And Actinic does use all the cores at times. At some points during the upload it uses multiple cores and reaches over 70% utilisation.

[Sean Williams]

Check your broadband upload speed - may only be a real 300kb or so; this makes a huge difference.
If your network supports ADSL MAX OR ADSL2+ make sure your router/modem is capable of making the most of these as they can double the upload speed.
Better still - if BT Infinity is available - sign up for that.

At work we have a measured 7mb down and 380kb up - a complete site refresh takes 3 hours inc images.
At home, I have 35+ mb down and 12-20mb up (depending on network load) and it takes about 10 minutes to refresh the site!

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Sean,

That's quite a difference. Same computer?

I guess we should include upload speeds in the mix. Mine are all with 1 Mbps upload speeds (tested).

When I do an upload most of the time is spent checking HTML pages. The time spent sending files is relatively short.

Mike