Magento

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). ...

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 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. ...

Sharing knowledge is always a good idea. Lately I have been doing lots of integration with Varnish and Magento with different clients and it will be interesting to find out if you have any ideas or suggestions (read improvements) to make it better and ultimately help the community even more: Setting up varnish in switch mode: In my home directory I always have a bash aliases (vim ~/.bash_aliases) file where I add the following iptable rules: ...

Did you ever want to create a redirect in a Magento Store without having to use htacess? Using Observers and the powerful Request and Response objects from Zend Framework you can. In this example I will show how you can do it. First you need to create the module, more on module creations here: http://goo.gl/vvT2j. Create a directory under app/code/community and name it FooBar, then create another directory under FooBar and name it Redirect. Create two directories inside FooBar: etc and Model. ...