Performance

On 7 September we went looking at customer/section/load on a stock Magento 2.4.8 store with the sample data. It’s the request that fills in everything a cached page can’t know about you: your name, your cart count, your messages. It can never be cached, so every call boots the whole application. One response was 61,194 bytes. About 59 KB of that was directory-data: every country and every region the store knows. The same list for every visitor on the planet, travelling through the one channel in Magento that exists because responses can’t be shared. ...

Nine days after the Varnish post, in July 2012, I wrote PHP Offloading… Nginx helps so much!. It explains why nginx beats Apache for Magento (“we are all about performance aren’t we?”), then hands over an nginx server block and a PHP-FPM pool with “of course suggestions are welcome”. Fourteen years on, here are mine. The pool starts like this: pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 50 pm.start_servers = 5 pm.min_spare_servers = 5 pm.max_spare_servers = 50 pm.max_requests = 500 Fifty. The post never says where 50 came from, and that one number decides whether the box runs flat out or falls over. So this is mostly about how to pick it, with two things the rest of that config got quietly wrong along the way. ...

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 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. ...