What's the Connection?

[psyphire]

I've been creating a catalog of products for the last couple of hours.

I've noticed something interesting:

My shopping cart system will begin to delay for long periods of time between page loads.

I've also been perusing your site looking up information here and there.

One thing I've noticed consistently on four separate occasions now is that when my shopping cart system delays and seems as though it's going to time out - your web site is not responding. Soon as the shopping cart jumps to the next page - your web site begins to function again. All other internet destinations work fine throughout these events.

So - what's the connection? Does squirrelcart connect to your servers for one reason or another?

[Rich]

The only connection made between your installation of Squirrelcart and our server is to check the current release of the software. This information is displayed in your control panel by way of an image in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Solid green indicates that your version is up to date
Yellow indicates that there is a minor update available (1.0.8 - 1.0.9)
Flashing yellow indicates multiple updates, or a jump in version numbers (1.0.9 - 1.1.0)
Red indicates that a major update is available (1.x.x - 2.x.x)
There have been reports in the past that this has caused some slow response time in the control panel. This is because the piece of code used for the version check is quite inefficient (we'll be working on that soon enough).

In the past this had to be disabled manually by editing code. In the latest release, 1.1.0, there is an option under Store Information to disable Version Control.

As for slow response times with our site, our host has been performing kernel upgrades to all of their servers, and a move to a new NOC is also taking place. Although we haven't been impacted by the move (yet) our server has been rebooted twice for kernel updates. Also, when they perform work on the primary name server, lookups to our domain will seem to lag.