Speed up your X-Cart Site! (Revised)

For those who want to speed up your X-Cart site, If you're getting a high server load, a few recommendations:

Install IonCubes PHP Accelerator or Zend Accelerator.

Login to the admin under modules, disable advanced tracking.

Edit include/atracking.php find the line update_statistics(); and comment this out with a # or //

Add php_flag zlib.output_compression On to your .htaccess file, if your having weird output in the admin per say in the X-Cart admin HTML Catalog generation simply add the same flag to an .htaccess in your Admin directory but set it to Off instead of On. (Thanks to Markwoo from the X-Cart forums for this one) A Side note on this one, if your having problems downloading generated csv or other such files, disable this php_flag and it will work properly, you'll have to re-enable it however to keep the site compressed. I'm not sure if this flag can be set via .php, if so you can always set the flag in the php file thats generating the file.

Do NOT use 3 column layouts, as they use multiple {math} statements within section loops, causing major cpu cycles. Even Smarty's documentations warns about this. There are other scripts as well, like the navigation.tpl for paging that uses {math} tags. If these simple math calculations can be moved into the php would be the best alternative and a better performance.

Optimize your database tables regularly, sometimes bad data collects in the db that causes a slower performance, and remember X-Cart is rather db intensive. This can easily be done via phpMyAdmin, or even a cron job.

Make use of the HTML Catalog as it can really lighten the load on the database as well as make download times faster for your customers. I know some say, I have over 10,000 products. My best suggestion is setup an alternate server that does nothing BUT generate the catalog.

These should greatly increase server load times as well as not beat up your mySQL server ;) Note that disabling both advanced tracking and the atracking.php will make your x-cart NOT store ANY stats, so your stats pages will not be reporting appropiate data, Use your server logs instead with a good log analyzer like WebTrends or such.

Happy X-Carting!

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