Server Error - Too many products in the Cart???

[stuartn]

Hi,

We have been having a problem occur, which seems to happen
when a customer places an order with a large number of items.
The Basket fills up fine, but when the customer attempts to
Checkout, the error occurs and they are shown an error page
which tells them that 'An Internal Server Error Occurred'.

From what I can make out, it seems to happen when they have
thirty or more seperate products selected for purchase,
and is a real problem for our Trade customers.

If anyone has any suggestions, knows of any Actinic limits,
or has had this problem happen on their website then please
let me know. (we are using Actinic Shared SSL)

Cheers,

Stuart.

[Nadeem]

Hi there

As far as i am aware, there is no limit within the Actinic Software. Just out of interest, how much space do you have left on your webspace.

The reason why i am asking, is when someone add something to the cart, the perlscripts creates an .cart file and if they abandon it, the cart file is still left on your website.

Might be an idea to ftp in your site, and check how many .chk and .cart as these are imcomplete orders.

[stuartn]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion. We have certainly got plenty of space left, and after having a look at what is on our server there was certainly no sign of those types of files clogging anything up.

We have had this problem before, and at the time submitted a Support Call to Actinic - however they only tested our Cart with two or three products so found it to work. I know that it works fine with just a couple of products, but when the customer adds in a larger number of products to their cart (thirty or so and more) then it seems to fall over.

Honestly have no explanation for it, so wondered if it was a widely known problem.

Cheers,

Stuart

[cdicken]

The 'Order Script' (os00000x.pl) is the most server intensive Perl script as it calculates all the tax etc. and creates the order.

You will need to talk to your web host about increasing the amount of memory allocated to Perl processes. There are also a few things that your host can do to increase server performance...

There are a couple of Perl modules that can be installed by your web host under ActivePerl to improve performance of Perl. These are called ActEncrypt1024 and Digest-MD5 and can be read about on the knowledge base:

http://www.actinic.com/knowledge/acatalog/Knowledge_Base_Cart_and_Checkout_128.html#aCD185

I've just seen Digest MD5 is not covered in that Article. To install it under ActivePerl, you simply open a command line and type

ppm install Digest-MD5

'mod_perl' is also talked about in that article - and can be installed under Apache.

[stuartn]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the info. I'll speak to our web hosts next time I get a chance and see what they say.

Thanks again,

Stuart

[stuartn]

After speaking to our current hosts, they tell me that they are not able to action these changes without themselves changing server providers.

Therefore, does anyone know of proven hosting, where we can process large Actinic orders without error, and also one which can provide Reseller packages of Server space.

Cheers again,

Stuart

[jebsond]

I am suffering this even with only 1 item in the cart.

My host tells me that they allow 8mb for perl processes... just how much space does this script need?

Thanks


DJ

[Darren B]

stuart

we use internetters, probably not the cheapest on the market but handle everything we need, hosting, sercure servers, registration e.t.c with many different hosting packages we use their standard 80 which as the name suggests 80Mb of web space and 20 email address.

they are also an actinic gold partner (not sure quite what this means but they are actinic ready)

you can find them here http://www.internetters.co.uk

hope this helps

Cheers
Darren ;)

[stuartn]

Thanks Darren.

I'll have a proper look at their site this evening.

At least now we have a better idea of exactly what we need, rather than when we first thought about using Actinic.

Anyway, thanks again.

Stuart :)