Site randomly/occasionally slows down

[Andrew H]

With help of great advice from this forum, I've now got the average speed of my site as fast as you could expect of a site on shared hosting, it's really fast!

 

The slight problem, very occasionally, maybe every 15 mins of continuous clicking/testing pages on the site, it completely hangs for about 10 seconds (long enough for someone to close the page down) and then it carries on. I get the feeling some kind of external process is causing this or some kind of loop... It usually does this when opening a page, but isn't specific to any particular page.

 

In the past I've had external widgets causing this problem, so I've disabled the like button (just in case) -but can someone help suggest what might be causing this -or how to narrow it down? I've just about removed all the modules that I can... Because it's so infrequent and random, it's hard to figure out why.

 

Also, although I have cache switched on, the images etc do not appear to be caching on the browswer (which I guess is something different) and appear to be loading each time -although I doubt would cause this particular problem.

 

thanks

[vekia]

maybe it's related to the page host? it's a shared host?

[Andrew H]

Thanks, it is a shared host. However, I had previously had the same site in the same location (on PS1.1 previously) without this issue, so I doubt it's a server problem. It's also not specific to a particular page, so I guess I can exclude features that are unique to the homepage...

[PascalVG]

Hi Andrew,

Does it happen in other browsers as well? Try to work in another browser for a while and see if it happens there as well. It might be something of an add-on in the browser self that sometimes 'needs attention'. Or try to work with it with add-ons turned off and see if that helps.

 

Do you use links to other pages (advertisements, pictures from photobucket or so, that might have a slow response?

 

My 2 cents,

pascal

[Andrew H]

Thanks Pascal -It just happened now actually -but stopped again. For about 5 minutes, each page was loading in about 7-10 seconds, painfully slow -but it's suddenly ok again now. I had the same issue yesterday on safari and using firefox today.

 

The only external feature I know of was facebook like button (which I'd already disabled).

 

Is there something that will detect what it's doing as I'm getting quite concerned about it as business is definitely down as a result.

 

When it's working ok, I have noticed that the site loads practically instantly if I switch off data mining -but I don't know if that's anything related to the random slow problem

 

Andrew

[Andrew H]

Update: I haven't had the issue since disabling the datamining module but as it's random it's hard to be sure -though there's a noticeable difference with this module switched off to the site average speed. Once I know the site is more reliable I'll try cleaning the database tables (the ones that are safe to empty) as I guess it could be that as nearly all the performance issues I've experienced with Prestashop have one way or another been related to excessively large database files.