hippietim
Axe-Master
Not a trivial site to build, but not as impossible as they're making it seem. I wonder if the database schema is poorly designed for its purpose. Even if that's true, they should have been able to refactor it by now.
Makes me want to have a crack at it myself (longtime with dev here), but I've got a gig that keeps me "pretty busy".
Sure, it's not completely trivial. But there is nothing about it particularly complex. The amount of data required to render the site is trivial - we're talking about tables with thousands of rows, not 10s of millions. The site used to perform quite reasonably so there was nothing wrong with the fundamentals in terms of performance - inventory query/lookup, hardware, etc. I'm not even sure how you could design a schema bad enough to perform as lousy as the Warmoth site.
I just navigated to the in stock Tele necks. That loads just fine. They may pre-cache the top level entry points. When I click to sort by price it triggers a single web request to fetch this content: https://warmoth.com/index.php/guitar-necks/telecaster?dir=asc&order=sort_price. This returns 9.2k of gzip'd html that is for the inner page rendering. This took 43 seconds! 43 seconds to fetch a trivial amount of content is absurd. Just opening that URL in a new tab took over a minute and returned 48k of html used to render the whole page because it was a new navigate.