Joomla 1.5 and VirtueMart: can bad performance be solved with upgrade?

Question

I got tasked with improving the performance of a Joomla 1.5 webshop that uses VirtueMart (about 1500 products in 30 categories). The total number of active modules is about 50. The current response time is over 10 seconds when clicking on a product category. Did some quick MySQL statistics and that single click generates over 15000 SELECT and 1500 UPDATE queries. So the slow response is not caused by one or two badly designed queries, it seems that the whole module behaves badly.

Because of that and the fact that there are a lot of forum complaints about the performance of this configuration, I decided that it's not worth trying to fix this.

I have two options: upgrade or move to a completely different system. My question: would the performance of Joomla 2.5 and the corresponding VirtueMart version be significantly better? (And I mean improved big time, needs to be like 100x times faster to be worthy of consideration.)

Answer 1

I am running a shop with about 1500 products and over a 100 categories (quite some products are in multiple categories. I run with Joomla 2.5.xx and VM 2.0.xx. Speed was never an issue.

It all of course depends on the environment it will run in/on. Since you do not give any info on that, my answer above will have to do :)

Answer 2

If paid extension is ok, this one can help you to speed up virtuemart: http://codingmall.com/products-mainmenu-8/65-speed-up-virtuemart