Just want to narrow this down before taking it up with my client's host as we have not exactly been having a smooth ride with them so far and this would be yet another thing! I'm pretty sure that this isn't going to me our end, but thought it might be worth checking out before making a fool of myself!

We are experiencing EXTREMELY slow page load times - even in the admin panel. To the level where clicking to upload an image on a shopping cart page it is sometimes taking upwards of around 10 seconds to even show the folders in the upload window.
Is there anything that I could have screwed up with the Couch installation that could be causing this?

My suspicion at the moment is that it could be slow communication with the SQL server? Would that be causing the loading issues (as I know that all of the data is stored there) and that would also account for the slow loading times on pages!

Cheers for any help you can provide.

Edit: Also, I am now using a paid/licensed version on their site, how do I access the premium support or is that also through the forum.

[KK]

Hi ticalex,

If your site is on a shared server, please know that if any of the other co-hosted sites is hogging the scant resources, it'd affect your site too. The onus, in such cases, is on the provider to try and stop sites from eating up resources all by themselves.

Database server is certainly a resource that could be the bottleneck but then so could be the webserver itself.

Try this - in couch/config.php, set the following to '1'

// 9.
// If set, CMS will cache generated pages and serve them if possible.
define( 'K_USE_CACHE', 1 );

Now logoff as admin/superadmin and access your site as normal visitor.
The first time you visit any page, Couch will generate it for you but for all subsequent visits, for all practical purposes, Couch would be out of the scene and the visitor will be served static HTML page (even MySQL would not be involved).

So now you'll be testing your server against plain HTML files.
See what response time you get.
If it still runs into several seconds, you'll atleast know that Couch or MySQL was not a culprit.

Hope this helps.

P.S. Regarding the premium support, you can use email to contact me directly if you do not wish to use the forum.

With cache enabled the page load time much quicker. Are there any drawbacks to leaving the cache enabled - will it affect any of the dynamic content (for instance the items in the shop or the display of the most recent items in the shop on other pages). If not I will probably leave that enabled.
If I force a page reload without cache in chrome (ctrl+shift+r) it still seems to be a little slower - but weirdly whether I am signed in to the superuser account seems to make a difference as well. If I am signed in the pages are slower to load, signed out the pages are quicker.

Thanks

Edit: OK I tried this with the cache feature disabled and it is considerably quicker (almost instantaneous) when I am *not* signed in to the admin panel.
If that isn't normal would be cool to know if there is a fix, but it's not devastating - normal users will have no access at all to the admin panel so I can't see it being a problem.

[KK]

If I am signed in the pages are slower to load, signed out the pages are quicker.

That is expected behaviour - Couch does not serve cached contents to logged-in users.

Replying to your first question - if with caching you get a reasonable performance, by all means please keep it on. It won't adversely affect any existing functionality.

Thanks.

Facepalm moment! I understand now. There is definitely a mild bottleneck issue with the sql service provided by the web host, but for the most part the issue was the fact that I was logged in I think. I took the site out of maintenance mode (client is currently adding content so wanted it down for the time being) and had a couple of people test it out, they had no comment with regards to load times.
Thanks for the help there, the issue with speed isn't quite as severe as I thought it would be!!

I have to say I've been really impressed so far with every aspect of Couch that I have used - I'm thinking of using this another two future jobs that I have lined up! The CMS side is quite easy to get the hang of, the documentation is concise and the tutorials really helped to ease me in to it! Not to mention the speed of support (even as a free user initially!).
Anywhere I can leave a good review?

[KK]

Being logged-in shouldn't really result in any noticeable performance hit at all. So there definitely is a database bottleneck at play on your site.

Anyways, I am glad things are in order now.
Thank you very much for your kind words
I'd help us if you could nominate Couch for the Critic's awards, if you please (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8282).

Done

[KK]

Thank you very much

One other totally unrelated thing - hopefully this will be something that can be quickly answered! On my gallery page there seem to be lines linking the images (using the slimbox gallery).
Is that something I messed up on implementation, or is that something that can be easily removed?
It's not a huge issue, my client hasn't commented on it at all, I think it's just me trying to get everything "just so"!

[KK]

Not sure if I understood the problem completely (a screenshot would be helpful) but I'd like to say that the front-end implementation of the gallery is meant as nothing more than a sample.

Couch simply provides you with tags that you could use to implement any markup you desire.