We have a small web farm running Windows 2008 Server and IIS7. The servers are setup in shared configuration mode, which means that they each share the same configuration file for ease of management. They also both share the same UNC path based data folders for each of the websites.

We recently had a request from a customer to use ZenCart with phpMyAdmin and a MySQL server. We installed and configured the MySQL server and everything went fine. We installed phpMyAdmin and got that running successfully and it isn't too bad. It has some rendering issues in IE browswers, but it sems to work.

Then, we copied the ZenCart 1.3.9f files to the website and began the installer. I fixed all of the various issues that the installed warned me about except the Current SQL Cache folder. That one seemed to be optional. (Tell me otherwise please).

After installation/configuration, the customer called and complained that it was painfully slow. I tried it and it is very slow. We thought it might be a UNC path problem, so we tried moving the files to each web server manually and changing the website to point to the local copy, but that didn't help.

I'm not even sure where to start. I could try to start turning modules and parts off, but I don't want to limit the features just to fix the speed. I have no idea how to test performance at each step of the process either. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks - Jon

Hi Jon,

I'm not specifically familiar with Zen Cart, but a few ideas for you. How is PHP running in general? You mentioned phpMyAdmin was working correctly, but do you have any other PHP apps to compare against? Just trying to narrow down if it's a PHP issue or not. Any errors or warnings when loading phpinfo(); ?

Have you tried running Sysinternals Process Monitor while browsing some of the Zen Cart pages? You might find errors or access problems specifically with the file system. It would also help you identify any php issues as you should see those files being accessed without any errors.

From there I would move on to MySQL. If stuck I would try to install something like Wordpress that's really quick and easy to get running to help troubleshoot and have something to gauge and narrow down performance problems.

Good luck -

Wayne

Something else I thought of... are you running ARR in front of the shared config setup? Does Zen Cart do any URL rewriting that might be causing conflict? If you are using ARR, what happens if you browse the IP of one WEB servers directly (maybe have to set your HOSTS file) and bypass it?