Faster Processor, more Ram or just going to be slow?

[Ginnys Attic]

Could you use the Advanced Link feature in the 'Links' panel of the product to create a link back to the main section. That's a quick and dirty way - although it would mean setting the link target value manually for all your products. I'll have a play and see if there is an automatic way.

Wowsers, that's not a bad idea Chris although potentially time consuming it does only need to be done once per product and considering I'm building the new site design from scratch and I am importing all the products and creating the sections when importing and assuming that the Detail URL or File field and Detail Link Text are the fields used for the advanced link I already know what the section URL would be so it would be zero extra work which is always nice

I've just checked the site and there is currently 1698 sections with 1487 products, I've turned off the generate extended info page for all the products and also removed the latest additions (we don't use the best sellers) side bar to see if it makes any difference and I am just trying to upload the site again to see if it generates and checks everything any faster.

So far it's still checking the HTML pages and it looks like it takes between 1 and 2 seconds per section which is still way slower than our original site although overall it is looking like being faster as it's around 30% of the way through checking whilst I've typed this which is certainly an improvement

[Ginnys Attic]

I've now tried the site without the extended info pages and it took 1 hour and 24 mins to generate, check and upload and although this is about 40 mins or so faster it's not quite the improvement i was hoping for

I've had a play with the using the advanced link to link the duplicates back to the original product but i don't seem to be able to get the url, does anyone know what variable i need to use is?

I've tried: ProductLinkInfo and Link but neither work even though they would appear to be the logical options. If i use Link i just get a blank link - <a href="">More Details....</a> and if i use ProductLinkInfo i get the same

[dave_finlayson]

This still seems slow to me. You aren't using any advanced menu's in the site by any chance are you? Sometimes these can slow things down considerably.

[Darren B]

are you using also brought aswell, but something is definatley amiss

i dont have 1500 single product pages but i have in exccess of 400 and it takes about 5 to 10 mins to check and upload these pages with the marketing features, i feel somethign is amiss somewhere

D

[Ginnys Attic]

Answering myself here but i solved the linking of duplicates back to the original product by simply changing all the extended info url's to be the same as the section url and simply use the url but don't generate the extended info pages, this actually works well as some products do have an extended info page for more details or larger images and this method doesn't seem to cause any problems.

[Ginnys Attic]

are you using also brought aswell, but something is definatley amiss

i dont have 1500 single product pages but i have in exccess of 400 and it takes about 5 to 10 mins to check and upload these pages with the marketing features, i feel somethign is amiss somewhere

D

Solved it this morning, i was also splitting the menu using the Idiots guide: Splitting your product list (TLS) into sections (http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=35340) method so i could have seperate products and manufacturers menus. I removed the code this morning and reverted it back to simply use the original Top Level Section List In Boxes and now it checks and uploads everything in around 30 mins

The slowest part of the process now is the actual sending of all the files (i'm still not sure why Actinic feels the need to upload everything evertime even if nothing has changed and all i've done is add a new product) but this is partly to do with i'm using a friends server to test the new design and single products per section and his server is based in America and i seem to only get 40k - 80k upload instead of the 250k ish that we get on our own server which is in the UK.

[los_design]

The slowest part of the process now is the actual sending of all the files (i'm still not sure why Actinic feels the need to upload everything evertime even if nothing has changed and all i've done is add a new product) but this is partly to do with i'm using a friends server to test the new design and single products per section and his server is based in America and i seem to only get 40k - 80k upload instead of the 250k ish that we get on our own server which is in the UK.

Ginny, I am not sure this is the case. I run two particular stores with in excess of 10k products (one over 20k). The main chunk of time is in the reviewing process, this can take in excess of 1 hour, but the upload depends on the number of changed files, changes to the site navigation heirachy etc.

For example...

If I change 1 line on one product, review takes 90% of the upload time.
If I change 1 section (resulting in a different link site wide) then wham, slo upload as it needs to generate new html pages.

Static content can be made a breeze using the old php include, but until we can tell actinic what to check/review me thinks we are stuck with slow times with site wide change uploads....I may be wrong but this is in my experience with high spec machines.

Regards

[jont]

I removed the code this morning and reverted it back to simply use the original Top Level Section List In Boxes and now it checks and uploads everything in around 30 mins

A lot of the time slow uploads can be down to Actinic unduly processing huge chunks of code due to some code changes that cause it to cycle through over and over - nested layout lists are a prime example - but not so easy to nail down the cause.

[cbarling]

Once design is not being changed, you can try switching off Design | Customise | Performance | Check for nested HTML Comment and Form tags. This can give a 15%-20% improvement in generation performance.

If all of your pages are getting uploaded every time there may be lists e.g. best sellers, which are getting re-generated all of the time and because they have changed they are triggering an upload of all pages. Actinic only uploads what has changed so if such lists are held in an array and included by Javascript, this can solve the problem. I hope I'm not sending you on another wild goose chase like last time - maybe others can comment?

Anyway, we will try to make some performance tips available in a document in the future.

Chris

[leehack]

I think the marketing lists are a key point, if you have these in your sidebars, then make sure you have them to auto-generate at least 7-10 days apart. Many of these are selected to auto update on every single upload and as they are included into sidebars, this triggers the every page upload. Check all marketing lists for placement and how often they refresh themselves.

CHRIS - i think you should be looking to have the standard parameters more user friendly in this area, too many silly mistakes are made by users here IMO.

The tip on switching off the performance checkers is something i did not know about and although dangerous if you are not careful, that sounds like a great little improvement also. I think quite a few sites are moving towards just having new products and best sellers on the home page, personally i am not a fan of this, but once again that does solve the all page upload setting.

[cdicken]

Hi all - I'm going to start a sticky to talk about speeding up performance, to post some of these tips on here.