Performance

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. ...