Magento an update...

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Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
So I've been playing with Magento ... doing some basic enough templating ... playing with its CMS and so on ... and I will still say I'm in love with it.

My problem.

****** its slow :D

I've no idea about a dedicated server with plenty of umpf ... but I seriously doubt it' run nicely on shared hosting or it'd definitely be a cause for violation of TOS. Its got pretty hefty requirements and I've heard people talking about having it running with dual quad core machines.

For the moment the shop I'm running is small enough and it can take the hit on speed. Load times are pretty slow I'm going to work on adding in APC and hopefully that'll give a slight performance boost. Even with caching enabled the thing is a beast. But its a damn damn nice beast.

How are others that are using it finding it ? I've heard people talking about dual quad core machines to run it. Apparently optimization is going to be the last thing that gets worked on. This does not bode well for adoption of the product. I've seen example sites people have up and running and my god they are running even slower than mine.

I didn't really want to add this to the other thread on Magento as its quite old and this is more related to performance now. (though if its felt it I'll merge it with the other thread)
 
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davkell

New Member
I was looking at the discussions about this on the Magento forums a couple of days ago and it seems to be a pretty big problem alright.

What are you running it on at the moment? I was going to try it on one of the blacknight VPS's - I've got a fairly small shopping site coming up in a couple of weeks I was going to use it for....sounds like my plans may have been dented a bit!
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
running it on a black night VPS .. but bog standard VPS I think so memory / CPU may be an issue ...

A LOT of its down to how you actually configure your server though ...

I've been tweaking the server tonight and I think I'm noticing good things.

Will update thread if I get to a stage I'm happy with.
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
comfortable ****ing about with root on your VPS ?
(I ask cus its not for the faint of heart) :D

Things seem to be improving so far ... but I'm finished for the night ... won't try till tomorrow night again.

mysql caching and php caching seem to be improving things.

The server isn't under heavy load though. Though in some cases the more hits on the server the better in terms of other queries being cached hmm..

I'll be tweaking more over the coming week or two I think

If you've got a linux / osx machine then its quite handy to follow the SSH install instructions for the base system ( / base system with demo store)
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
ok ... little update ... wasn't meant to be but I ended up messing about some more.

APC seems to give around a 25% increase in performance.
Not great but better than nothing.

This is on a fairly low end VPS so every little helps at the moment.
 
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alias

New Member
Hi Guys,

It's my first time posting here! I just wanted to add my 2 cents. I've been using Magento for awhile now, since before version 1.0 anyway, and I'm currently using it in a couple of professional projects. It may seem like the ideal solution in many cases but be aware that if your client seeks major functionality changes it can become very painful very quickly. You need a good understanding of EAV database structures and processes, also the Zend Framework. Module creation can be tricky to get to grips with too while your starting off. Also the documentation is pretty much non existent when it comes to more complex stuff. I imagine this is a business decision by Varien in an effort to push their various paid support packages.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great platform based on what open source alternatives are out there, just be aware that it will require a lot of time and effort to make it play ball if your project requires a lot of backend customisation.

In relation to performance, yes it isn't great but it's getting better. You need a VPS with at least 512MB of RAM for starters. You might find this link useful if you haven't already seen it.
Since this forum won't let me post actual URL's!!! WTF? Just google the following phrases and click the first result.
​
  • Performance is Key! - Notes on Magento’s Performance

Other links people may find useful if considering Magento for your next project.


  • Magento eCommerce Review: Platform Perils and Impressions, Three Months In
  • Magento Database Diagrams 1.0.x & 1.1.x

Anyway goodluck,

A.
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
Nice post thanks :)

I've already been on the majority of those pages and run across the issues therein :)

real world stats people will understand at the moment.

A page load is currently taking 3.5 seconds. (This is down from 4.5 seconds yesterday) ... The Admin section seems to have improved a hell of a lot as well. I think it feels a lot more noticable in the admin section than on the front end.

More tweaking to go ... if I could get it down to 2.5 seconds I think I'd be happy ...

There are only 30ish products in the database right now. This is also not a site expecting hundreds of visitors a day. Though my testing seemed to show it could handle a fairly decent hit on number of users.
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
xcache seems to do the trick ...

down to 2.5 seconds for a page load ..

no way near ideal ... but I can live with it for the moment :)
 
nevf

nevf

New Member
I told you it was slow. And it's a right pain in the hole as regards speed.

Used it tonight tho on costumeshop.ie, handed over the CC details and all - very nice from the customers end....
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
My customer / shop owner ... is quite happy with it and all the default features. Adding in a few extras and they are thinking about using it on another site. Speed being the only issue.

I never had this sort of response to OSCommerce / Zen Cart :)
 
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alias

New Member
As I mentioned I'm using it for a couple of projects and clients always bring up the speed issue at some point during the development cycle. It's normally the second thing they notice, the first being how great the analytical dashboard is! The administration area is normally alot slower then the frontend, that been said this can be improved using various optimisation tricks outlined in this post and elsewhere on the web. Fine tuning and ensuring the production version of the site runs on a beefy server are really all you can do until the Magento team optimise the Magento code base, and with the pressure from the community hopefully they will soon. Even with these speed issues my clients feel that the pros outweigh the cons in the case of Magento, so they continue to request it.
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
Its about the same for me at the moment ... its a small enough store and its an extension of their webpage rather than their livelyhood. So they can live with it being slow enough.

I'm hoping to do some testing on some of my other hosting acounts.

On the plus side ... having given client access to extremely slow system and then making the improvements ... they seem to think its great now and a lot faster which it is :p


Can I ask what kinda hardware you've thrown at it ?
 
A

alias

New Member
Generally I use 512MB VPS slices running Ubuntu and a LAMP stack (provided by Slicehost.com) for my Staging and Production Environments when starting off. The great thing about these slices are that they can be resized (scale up the specs) easily with little or no service disruption. You can also enable auto backups for a little extra. Going to resize the production slices running Magento to 1GB prior to launch, then resize up when needed. See their site for full hardware specs. Using them for about a year and a half now and haven't had any problems! Have a Media Temple account for about 8 years but I'm closing that account soon as I haven't been happy with them for a long time and they are ending their flashcom service next month. Transfering this to slicehost and using Red5. Also have a couple of Blacknight SOHO accounts for very small projects, yet to try their VPS offerings... they weren't available when I first started using VPS... blacknight seem good anyway, no problmes with the SOHO accounts so check out their VPS to. Just heard that slicehost have been bought out by Rack Space, don't think that's a good thing, but according to the team that means better service... check out the forums for more on this forum.slicehost.com

My Development Environment is a T7400, 2.33GHz Intel Xeon Quad Core, 4GB RAM. No problem with Magento on this...
 
Forbairt

Forbairt

Teaching / Designing / Developing
I was already having a look through slicehost last night :D

Currently I'm happy ... iwth this shop ... but still 2.5 sec load time is a bit iffy for me ...

tweaking ... tweaking ... tweaking ... still learning a hell of a lot about how the VPS works which is a good thing.
 
mneylon

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Would a base install have the speed issues as well or would I need to add extras / plugins?
 
S

shaneod

Member
Performance seems to be the main issue with Magento alright, it's putting me off it altogether to be honest, i haven't a clue how to tweak servers and all that stuff.
 
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