Tried everything that I could find to patch up Zen Cart and make it put up pages faster, but none of that worked. Even did the phpMyAdmin thing and tried to clean up the datafiles. phpMyAdmin gave me the sad story that there were things not enabled in configuration, so that did not work. Logged on to MySQL with HeidiSQL (kind of like phpMyAdmin) and ran a couple of tests on the DB, but nothing.
I had run across an article about “mysql query cache“, and the difference having cache enabled when there are repeated requests for the same data (the same “select” statement).
After trying to get everything fixed, I did a search for “mysql query cache” with Google, and ended up at a MySQL developers page where they explained everything in elegant form. The MySQL page even explained how you could enable cache for a sql statement, without having to shutdown MySQL. I followed the instructions, and now pages that used to take 20-50 seconds to load pop up in 3-5 seconds.
Now comes the fun – let’s see if any other pages load faster!
Yes! Other pages (that depend on MySQL) definitely load faster.