I am working with a client whose site has the potential to start drawing large amounts of traffic. The client is getting thier own Television show.

I have used osCommerce in the past and I have been happy with it. However I am looking at how well osCommerce responds under high traffic. What can be done to ensure the stabality of the shopping cart?

Hi Rox Off,

osCommerce is a very stable application - please indicate how much traffic you're talking about...

I can comment specifically on a couple of our customers that are seeing thousands of uniques each week, with hundreds of transactions...

The most important thing to consider when running a high traffic osCommerce site is server resources. Each user creates a session - therefore memory and CPU become very important to efficiency (ie. pages being loaded quickly and avoiding server timeouts when users attempt to access their shopping cart or begin their checkout process)

Usually for high traffic osC sites we recommend a VPS or dedicated server. If the traffic is high enough, I would recommend 2 servers - 1 app and 1 db.

Hope this helps and do not hesitate in contacting me with any additional questions you may have.

Yea, OSCommerce is pretty stable but I have never seen it under a high loaded server. Like Andrew was saying the best setup for a very high traffic site would be to place the php/html files on 1 server and the mySQL on another. If it is a high traffic site you may want to use dual Xeon's for both servers and at least 1 GB RAM.

Also, look around at some other shopping carts. Not trying to put OScommerce down but there are some nice paid programs out there. One that some of my customers use is Turnkey Web Tools (http://www.turnkeywebtooks.com) < Not my site >

Yes the plan is to move to 1 or more dedicated server if the show takes off. the traffic right could be ran off a shared account. My plan is to start the process of moving up.

I am not sure about traffic because I have not ran a site like this before. The potential is quite large. One of the clients competitors has thier own show as well as national ad spots inlcuding a super bowl ad. S this could turn out fairly large.

osCommerce is a great application if you have the money for it. It comes with powertools, I would use it if I had powertools, maybe customers would be intrested in that also.

If you have the money for it?
osCommerce is free, its open source.