Its work an easy

I'm Using Abantecart V1.3.4, with fast checkout & the modal box.
Is there a way of presenting the shipping address form to customers first (with a same as delivery address checkbox) first, followed by the payment address form? It does seem to be the most frequent order amongst shopping carts, so closer to what some customers may expect to see. Also there will be less instances of customers switching their thoughts between payment & delivery so it would perhaps seem like a smoother experience. Or maybe I'm just overthinking things a bit.

In AbanteCart, you can modify the checkout sequence by customizing the template files or using an extension. Rearrange the form display order in the relevant checkout template to show the shipping address first, then add a "same as delivery" checkbox for the payment address.

PHP Version 8.3
AbanteCart Version 1.4.0
Template: Novator
Categories: 212 (17 parent categories, the rest childs)

The front end does ok and loads without resource spiking for the volume we get currently (4-5 concurrent users is generally the peak) but as soon as I start to edit a product in the admin section even with no current users hitting the site it causes the DB to spike in resources and often leads to 500 errors/timeouts for the front end.

can you run this sql-query in the same time with product editing?

SHOW PROCESSLIST;

It will show list of all queries and you can define what current sql-query overloads you DB.
But probably DB is not a cause.
Database connection can be expired because of some other thing's processing, for example, resizing of images. Resize works in the same http-request and connection to db is open at this point and waiting (php-lock).
You can try to enable debugging int the system->settings->system to see  timings.
Or you can use xdebug profiling (for advanced users).

Probably you have some huge images of product that cannot be resized quickly or your host disk is slow etc..
Or some 3dparty extension slow down your admin..
Also you can look into cache speedup side.. redis or memcached.

Some different causes can be there.. it's require investigation.

did you get solution ?i have met same problem

Is there a setting to peridoically clear cache?

here's the problem: my hosting package sets a limit on iNodes. Cache consumes iNodes, and as a result peridoically my site gets disabled (customers cannot place orders because they cannot add items to a shopping cart) unless I go in and manually clear all the site cache.

I'm on 1.3.3, and the cache clear function is only manual, there's no way to set the site to clear cache based on some time frame (daily, weekly, monthly, whatever).

Is there a setting somewhere that I have missed that would resolve this? Or an extension that could perform a periodic clear?