The "Site load speed analysis" service is aimed to analyse the page loading process, the order in which web browsers load particular parts of your site, how browsers render and display them.

Within this service the following will be checked:

• HTTP Keep Alive connection support
• number of HTTP requests your pages consist of and their size
• text files compression
• static assets caching
• in-line and external JavaScripts and CSS
• multimedia content size, graphics quality
• JavaScript performance
• background AJAX requests

As a result you'll be given a piece of advice on how to re-design your site in order to improve the load speed.

In most cases a dedicated web server comes with the pre-installed web server software (Apache, mySQL, PHP) and their configuration stettings are set to defaults. Software defaults are usually chosen for maximum compatibility so that the software works on most servers right after its installation requiring no additional tuning. But the default configuration sometimes does not take into account your server capabilities and therefore may be inefficient.

This service is aimed to check the server status and help you to configure your server software to use available server resources more efficiently.

The more efficiently your server software uses server resources, the faster the site works and the more customers your site will serve.

Within the bounds of the "Web server performance analysis" service the following points will be checked:

• Web server configuration
• PHP server API and installed PHP extensions
• mySQL configuration and current database server status
• operating system settings
• hardware configuration

As a result you'll be given a piece of advise on how to tune your web server software to get maximum performance. The "Web server performance analysis" service assumes that you have a dedicated web server or at least VPS or VDS so that you have enough privileges to modify the server configuration and restart services if needed.

Note: In case you have a hosting account on a shared server, perhaps this service won't be of any value for you and you'd better contact your hosting support regarding the server software configuration tuning.

Optimizing the PHP code of your site will result in a faster site delivering a better browsing and shopping experience to your customers comparing to your competitors.

Unfortunately constantly growing database size, a lot of installed add-ons and modules and increasing amount of data X-Cart has to handle as a result, heavily customized X-Cart code and the software architecture peculiarities not taken into consideration while implementing custom features to X-Cart - all these may sometimes lead to noticeable delays in dynamic HTML output generation and cause considerable site performance degradation.

The "PHP code benchmarking" service aim is to locate narrow bottle necks in the PHP code and to search for the ways of improving it.

While performing this service the engineer will measure time that takes the key stages of run time:

• X-Cart engine and modules initialization
• starting a session
• fetching data from the database
• compiling Smarty templates
• generating the HTML output

Basing on this investigation the engineer will provide a report on the most CPU resource consumable parts of your PHP code and give you recommendations on how to improve, re-factor or get around it.

So keep in mind that the faster your site works, the more clients your site will serve.

mySQL is used by X-Cart as the main data storage, so the speed with which X-Cart reads data from/writes data to the database is one of the most important factors affecting the overall site performance.

The faster mySQL executes queries, the faster the page content is generated, the sooner your site appears in your customers' browser. As the number of your site visitors grows, mySQL has to look through greater amount of data to produce the result, taking more memory and CPU resources to execute the same queries.

The purpose of the slow SQL queries analysis is to reveal slow SQL queries and make them run faster.

An engineer will examine the mySQL slow queries log, find the slowest ones, analyze them and suggest the best way of making them run faster.

Keep in mind that the faster a particular SQL query is executed, the faster X-Cart will run, the more customers your site will serve.