cart response time?

is it them or me or the 'net?

[chewy]

I've just installed a new shopping cart on one of my sites.

Normally, this is a great tool and I've installed it numerous times without any apparent problems.

Today, when I hit the buy button, the delay today (Sunday - about 5PM) was infinite. The browser timed out before the actual https cart pages could load. Other times it has been a semi-acceptable delay of 4 - 10 seconds.

Timing out is unacceptable.

Of course, I checked everything with the site (including logging into the shopping cart server and successfully posting a technical service inquiry) and everything seemed fine, so apparently it wasn't my internet connection.

- they say they are working on it...

Please how does one go about evaluate cart load time to determine if there is a REAL problem or just a temporary or local problem?

Thanks,

-C

[jecasc]

Depends. Are you sure it's the shopping cart and not a problem with some software on your side?
I had an antivirus program installed once that offered "online protection" and used to check all websites for viruses. Sometimes it would take ages until a website would load - or it would not load at all.

To check if its a cart problem you could put in some code to measure the execution time of the script.

[edited by: lorax at 1:55 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2008]

[jsinger]

Please how does one go about evaluate cart load time to determine if there is a REAL problem or just a temporary or local problem?

I'd just get on our cart's user group and ask others if they're having the problem.

[pbradish]

Could be your PC, the cart software, server host - or a combination of the three.

We've been dealing with some funky MySQL related problems that only seem to effect the final stages of placing an order. It basically times the customer out. Really frustrating.

[chewy]

funny, there's no support forum for 1shoppingcart - I've been using it so long and it has been so flawless that I've never had to look.

They have a blog, but it is just corp-speak and it stopped back in 2007 some time.

This cart seems to be loading fine now, although it still seems slow compared to some others that I now know about.

I'm not a scripting kind of guy so that's out for me.

pbradish - it could also be the phase of the moon, or what I call a "bird on the wire" (anything including bursty traffic on one subnet or another etc). I have a place near the sea where the telephone wires are easily corroded and we always know that the 'net connection will be slow when it is windy and rainy.

Hopefully ecommerce hosts don't have that kind of problem but I've seen weirder things.

We once had a site loose Google ranking for no good reason - we thought it was some kind of penalty - but WebmasterWorld and other people confirmed there was nothing wrong with the site. It turned out there was a microwave backhaul that was flakey due to ice in an antenna. They fixed this and the Google ranking miraculously returned. Fortunately the host is operated by a friend so I get the real details when things go wrong.