I am thinking of moving to Pinnacle Cart which looks feature rich and quite solid.

What is the limit of concurrent users and monthly visitors? What other limits might I come across?

I know this has much to do with hardware, but I am wondering what the software limitations would be assuming it is placed on a server with plenty of headroom.

Thanks, Dave

Hi, Dave

Personally, I use zen-cart for my own e-commerce sites and find it is really suitable for building any size sites and have no limitations itself. It is an open source project basing on PHP+MySQL, too.

Have a nice day,

Thanks. I do see that you say there are no inherent software limitations. Which actually does answer my question :)

I am new at this so let me rephrase my question.

Will more visitors require more RAM, more disk IO, more CPU, more bandwidth? All of these?

I need to get a setup that can handle a Christmas rush, and handle it smoothly.

I do not know what kind of servers Yahoo uses, but they have been very robust. I also think their cart is custom with some very low level programming language. Currently the site is hosted by Yahoo. I only know 2 things about it. It is a SHARED server and I do not even have a static IP. SO I am not looking to go from the pan to the fire, but to a better pan :)

Thanks,

Dave

Talking about zencart and others. Any open source application for your ecommerce business can get you in trouble. Open source is alway vulnerable to hackers

Talking about zencart and others. Any open source application for your ecommerce business can get you in trouble. Open source is alway vulnerable to hackers

I usually use secunia.com - Secunia Advisory and Vulnerability Database.

Example: http://secunia.com/advisories/search/?search=zen+cart

Will more visitors require more RAM, more disk IO, more CPU, more bandwidth? All of these?

Yes, all of these. That is basically the same with most PHP/MySQL based web sites or applications.

PHP itself doesn't require much disk I/O, especially if you use an opcode cacher that caches in memory, like Xcache. But you have access logs in your web server, so more hits means more writes to the disk. Of course, the biggest I/O user will be MySQL, and that increases as pageviews increase.

More visitors means more PHP processes needed to handle the requests, thus greater memory usage. MySQL memory usage also goes up with greater concurrent connections and greater queries per second. If your using Apache, then memory usage tends to go up quite a bit faster than if you were using nginx, litespeed, lighttpd, etc.

You can bet Yahoo uses load balancers with DB clusters and web clusters to handle all that traffic.

The real key is what kind of hosting hardware you get. If it's a bare bones $5 month deal, you'll likely be on the same computer with 400 other accounts. If it's virtual, often only 12-20 customers share a computer. Dedicated is of course, the best insurance but can cost $80-$100 a month.
I wouldn't even put a low traffic business on a $5 a month hosting, you'll see MYSQL bombing out due to not enough processor ticks being available. Virtual is much better, $40 a month or so and unless it's a really high volume site with 10 people checking out at any given time it should handle an E commerce site with no problem.
The key is to ask how many clients are allowed on the package you're shopping for. Most good places state the max they will allow for virtual. It also really depends on what other load (like a busy wordpress blog) is going to be on the host.