Optimize Zen Cart SQL Queries

I’m in the middle of building a new storefront, but the legacy Zen Cart v1.5.7 that stays live for now is putting a heavy strain on the server. The culprit is a group of SELECT queries that pull product information; they run hundreds of times a minute and push the CPU load to a point it losses connection to the database and then kills the server. What I need from you is a clean-cut optimisation of those reads—no feature rewrites, just faster execution: • Analyse the existing SELECT statements with tools like EXPLAIN and slow-query logs. • Adjust indexes or restructure the queries so the product catalogue can be fetched with minimal cost. • Provide a concise change log and before/after performance metrics (query time and server load). • Apply the changes on a staging clone first, then guide me through moving them to production with zero downtime. My environment is standard LAMP (MariaDB 10.x), and I will give shell and phpMyAdmin access to a sandbox copy. If you have experience squeezing speed out of Zen Cart’s schema, even better. Deliverables are the updated SQL (or patch file) plus the performance report. Once the live store’s load average drops to an agreed threshold and page response improves, the job is done.

Project ID: 40616374