Posts

“are these tasks still running?” I asked that on 2 September, about two background jobs Claude had started, which had been sitting at “Running” for 94 minutes. They were waiting for a Flatpak SDK to finish installing. It had finished at about the four-minute mark. Nothing had failed. They were waiting for themselves Both loops tested for the install with pgrep -f "flatpak install", and were written to stop once nothing matched. pgrep -f searches the whole command line of every process. It leaves itself out of the results, but not the shell that called it, and that shell’s command line held the entire loop. So each loop found itself, and each found the other. They were waiting for their own exit. ...

Most monitoring systems tend to answer whether the server is up or not. All of that can be green while an ecommerce checkout is broken, the cart page could even respond 200s, while the add-to-cart button does nothing, and the graphs stay flat because nothing crashed. In November 2021 I wrote a little bot to answer the other question. Every five minutes it opens a real browser, searches for a product, adds it to the cart and loads checkout, and confirms that under the conditions at the time, checkout is up. ...

In 2015, at BuyerQuest, I wrote a docker-compose file that ran Magento on my computer. I took it with me to Anatta, and then to Scrubs & Beyond. This week it became Kapelos, a public project anyone can clone. Most of the file changed over those years. What I built it for never did: one Magento store, on one computer, from a file I can read top to bottom. The oldest copy I still have The oldest version I still have is from March 2019. It’s Compose format 2.2, with thirteen services: ...

By using Zend Queue with magento we can create an event driven asynchronus integration system. Just think about how much work you will offload from Magento when integrating with other systems and Magento itself. To keep things simple, let’s pretend that you send emails to your customers everytime a new product gets added. Usually these products get added during the day which also happens to be when your customers are most active buying in the site. An alert about a new product is very important but you don’t want to bug down your email server. That’s where Zend Queue comes to the rescue. In this example I am using mysql to store the queue. If you follow the same example remember to create the tables first, these can be found under: lib/Zend/Queue/Adapter/Db/mysql.sql ...

Cloning magento modules will never this easy again. Today I wanted (read was forced) to create a module based on one of Magento’s core. Literally I needed to clone some of the Magento modules and while the copy and paste is simple stuff, going class by class and file by file renaming and configuring files is not joke. So why do I need to clone it instead of just doing the usual OOP stuff Magento is so good at? Simply because the functionality is really different in most files and settings. So creating a payment method or paygate or giftcard module is easier when you have an skeleton to work with. Think about it, how different is paying with PayPal from Google Checkout? Functionality wise not that much, essentially they do the same thing but implement it differently. ...

Since the cool kids at Google, Microsoft and Amazon researched how performance and scalability affect conversion rates, page load time has become the topic of every eCommerce store. Magento was once a resource hog that consumated everything available to it and you had to be a magician to pull off some awesome benchmarks without using any reverse proxy or full page cache mechanism. Creating a full page cache with nginx and memcache is really simple (right after hours of research). ...

Sometimes you decide that you don’t want to use any GUI to connect to your wireless network, especially when it doesn’t seem to work. One of the main benefits of Linux and any other Unix based operating system is its ability to empower users to do things on their own. So tonight when the latest Ubuntu updates broke my laptop’s wireless, I decided to write a little script to fix it. ...

There are several ways to accomplish the same task and some are more elegant than others. This one makes any Magento community edition fly and is cheap and quick (read no Magento compliant - because it modifies the templates) In other words while this trick can help you boost your Magento store server response I am not too proud of it. Why is that a big deal? I am not a huge fan or changing templates, even if they are “allowed”. ...

So let’s continue our attempt to improve Magento’s performance and this time around let’s focus on the web server itself. There are a bunch of web servers out there but the most known are, a least to me: Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd My favorite, and of course I am biased here, is Nginx and it approach to serving content. As you may all know Nginx is an event-based web server and the main advantage of this asynchronous approach is scalability. ...

So you recently launched your PHP application (read Magento) just to realize that it is really slow even though you have state of the art hardware, software and it is configured to kick ass. You decided to install varnish to help full page caching and your CDN, which it only has gzipped merged and minified assets, to serve content faster now your site seems to be flying but New Relic still reveals so many bottlenecks specially for the fillers you needed to keep some dynamic content rocking. ...