Hi,
Yes, the problems with load speed are gone. You can have a look at http://www.computercentrale.be to check what kind of response times we have now.
We currently have +- 160 categories and 90.000 products in the database.
There was not really 1 fix to get to this result but we suspect the performance problems were related to:
- The version of Prestashop: 1.5.5.x brought performance improvement compared with 1.5.4.x
- We moved from a shared hosting to a dedicated server, we believe the MySQL was a serious bottleneck at our provider's side mostly due to memory limitations we suspect. With a large Prestashop database some huge queries are performed and this requires memory
- We did some tuning of our dedicated MySQL server, mainly memory optimisation
Our server specs: Intel Quad-Core Xeon E3-1220, 1 CPU, Quad Core, 3100Mhz, 8 GB RAM DDR3 running Prestashop 1.5.6.2