Increasing The Performance of X-Cart
If you're finding that your X-Cart installation is running slow or the performance is just not what it was when you first setup X-Cart, you should try a couple of these tips to see if you can improve performance.Â
About Our Servers (Shared Hosting)
If you've been hosted on Freeportway shared servers, you should now that we enable the PHP APC cache for all sites. We also increase the memory PHP can allocate. On most servers, this amount is set to 200M (200 megabytes) which is a lot of memory, but will ensure that PHP never runs out. We run between 6 and 8 customers per machine in total. That means the shared hosting performance is very good
even if you have several customers who consume a lot of resources, your sites should respond very well.Â
MySQL versions are 5.x and typically PHP is 5.1.x or better. We do standardize currently on 5.2 for dedicated and VDS servers, but since our shared hosting servers utilize Plesk, we are contrainted to what Plesk requires.
Our shared hosting machines are dual processor machines (Intel Core Duo's) that typcially run at 3ghz and we install 2G of memory which can be upgraded at any time.
Disclaimer
Like with all things in X-Cart changes, please backup your database and your site (using Plesk) before doing any of
the following tips to improve performance in X-Cart.
Disable Advanced Statistics
The module "Advanced Statistics", although helpful can really slow a site down. This is the #1 culprit for poor performance in an X-Cart installation. By disabling this module, we've seen speed increases by 50 - 100%, especially on sites that are highly visited. This is mainly due to the fact that the MySQL database is used to track all clicks and navigation through the X-Cart shopping cart. This information if very valuable, but we recommend disabling this module in favor of using the Google Analytics module, which is something that will push the same infromation into a better reporting system (Google Analytics). To disable this module, all you need to do is click on "modules", then uncheck the "Advanced Statistics" module and click "Update" at the bottom of the screen.Â
Optimize tablesÂ
In your X-Cart Admin, under the Summary menu, select "Tools". In the Tools screen, you'll see a button "Optimize Tables". By selecting this, you'll re-create your MySQL indexing. This will help speed up queries and
for database intense searches, this will help with text based look ups. We suggest doing this monthly for sites that do about 10 - 15 orders daily. More than that you should increase this to bi-monthly. If you check the X-Cart forums, you may find some scripts that you can run to automate this process.
Force Cache Generation
Under "Summary", click on the "Tools" option, then press the button "Force Cach Generation". Although not a "performance tweak", this can help with product pricing issues and the display of products in your shopping cart.  Especially, if you're using BizSync which is always changing pricing for discounts and sales, when you do a "price sync", this can detach products based on new prices which x-cart places in the xcart_pricing table.
