Checkout page load slow

Question

I have a couple of Magento sites (only selling a couple of products from the sites) that have been upgraded a few times since 2010 (now on v1.9) and they have gradually become slower.

The page load time between the product page and checkout is now 30 seconds! I've cleared out the SQL database. I guess I need someone to perform test the whole site and cure the problems but don't really know where to get sensible advice. can anyone point me in the right direction?

Apologies if I have posted this in the wrong place or on the wrong forum

Answer 1

I recommend you look into using php7.1 or 7.2 if you aren't using it already.

It's unlikely your host will allow you to make changes to your MySQL config so I think that your best option. The Magento store might need patching to work on php7.2. You could look into OPcache too if the PHP version upgrade isn't an option.

Answer 2

Gradually becoming slower... since 2010 ...

It indicates that the performance issue is in connection with the data accumulated. Possibly increased traffic as well.

I would advice to check these on priority:

PHP sessions

Browse to your PHP sessions directory (i.e. cd /tmp) in SSH and list the session files. If there are too many files (you can estimate the directory size by running du -csh ., then you very likely have a misconfigured PHP session garbage collector. I've seen it many times with misconfigured hosts accumulating millions of session files. This is causing significant performance issues.

To fix, make sure to add this to your php.ini:

session.gc_probability=1

Full Page Cache

Are you making use of a full-page cache plugin? Make sure that you do. Lesti FPC is a popular choice.

See the full performance check list in my blog post.