Speed

Increase speed Magento using Yireo Search Engine Page Cache

You can increase the loading speed of your Magento webshop using Yireo Search Engine Page Cache extension. Search engines and some other sites use web crawling or spidering to update their web content or indexes of your web content. Using your sitemap the crawlers are informed wich pages they have to visit and when to return to that page. This can result in a heavy load on your server when they visit and generate these pages. Blocking search engines to your site to prevent heavy load is out of the question. Using Yireo Search Engine Page Cache the search engines are allowed to crawl your site while preventing high load of the server at the same time. Read on to learn how you can accomplish this ideal situation.

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book review: Instant Magento Performance Optimization How-to [Instant]

Instant Magento Performance Optimization How-to [Instant] – Nayrolles Mathieu — Instant Magento Performance Optimization How-to – Nayrolles Mathieu

Tune the performance of your Magento installation using the ebook Instant Magento performance optimization How-To by Packt. I just finished reading this book and wrote this quick review. This Packt Instant How-To provides a quick and easy way to improve your Magento performance using step-by-step instructions. It’s a short (56 pages), fast, focused guide delivering immediate results. This book is specially made for Magento administrators and users who are familiar with using the backend technical console, but people who are new to anything beyond this and wish to optimize their online store for increasing performance can also read this book.

I can recommend buying this book if you’re looking for a complete reference of Magento optimization steps. Lees verder →

Large scale Courier to Dovecot migration: profit!

Two weeks ago, we were plagued by several unnerving IMAP and POP performance incidents. That is euphemism for “too slow to be usable”. The worst one happened at Monday morning, coincidentally at the same time as the whole country tends to check their mail. Most likely we had hit a secret capacity limit. But where? Our capacity monitoring displayed happy green lights exclusively. Low CPU levels, low network throughput, low disk wait times. Time for some investigation and counter measures.

TL;DR: we achieved jaw-dropping profit in network and NFS usage levels by switching from Courier to Dovecot. It took some efforts to do this transparently, though.

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Optimizing SQL improved loadingtime of website

The CPU load of the database server from one of our clients was real high. After moving a copy of their website to a development server they started investigating and optimize their website. These optimizations led to a reduction of the CPU load for the database server. But not enough. According to the slow queries log a simple SQL statement still took too much time to execute. Using the SQL commando EXPLAIN they discovered possibilities to set the missing index field in the database. This resulted in faster queries and – as you can see in the graph below after the second weekend – an enormous drop of CPU load of the database server. Faster queries, faster website and less load to the CPU of the database server.

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Image optimization is important

Smush.it in actie met het Byte logo

Image optimization is important when attempting to improve the speed of your website. Search engines take the loading speed into account when rating your site. A slow site will generally end up further down in the search results than a fast website. Your visitors will appreciate a faster website too. Research shows that when loading your site takes too long visitors will tend to leave. In this blog I will explain how you can improve the speed of your site by optimizing the images using Smush.it. I will focus on ways to implement image ‘smushing’ for three well known CMS: WordPress, Joomla and Magento. Lees verder →

Reduce Magento resources using meta tag robots

Reduce the amount of resources your Magento webshop uses by setting meta tags robots. Google and other search engines crawl your website. Every single page needs to be generated which will cost a lot of resources. Pages like Layered Navigation don’t need to be crawled.

In this post I’ll explain you how to reduce the consumption of resources for the Layered Navigation pages in Magento. This will also increase your pagerank since you tell the search engines like Google which pages are irrelevant.
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Tell Magento to store PHP sessions in Redis

Redis

Redis seems to be the backend of the future for large Magento installations, because of its speed and ability to handle Magento’s cache tags. Now if you have all your cache blocks in a blazingly fast memory store, it would be nice if PHP would also save its sessions there (in stead of the slow file/database backend).

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Magento, Ioncube and performance

IonCube

In this post I explain why you shouldn’t use Ioncube encoded Magento modules.

Ioncube is an encoding system for PHP files. Ioncube-encoded files aren’t readable (by humans) so software companies use it to protect their intellectual property.

Many commercial Magento modules are encoded by Ioncube. Performance wise, this is not a good thing. Why? Ioncube integrates with PHP and attaches itself to the include/require functions. Every time a PHP file is required (regardless of whether it’s Ioncube-encoded), it is opened first by PHP itself and then again by Ioncube¹. The decoder is closed source so humanity will probably never find out why, but the result is a performance penalty.

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Should I use the Magento Compiler?

A lot of mysterious fog surrounds the Magento Compiler, a feature that was introduced in Magento version 1.4.2. According to the original announcement, it realizes 25-50% performance gain. But later Yoav Kutner (Magento chief) said:

In later versions since we optimized the catalog EAV, Magento Compilation is not really needed if you have byte code caching and if it is configured correctly

So is it still useful or not? What does he mean with “configured correctly”? Only one way to find out: descend into the crypts of Magento internals.

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Speeding up Magento imports (English)

We often receive feedback from customers having problems with importing products into Magento. Now we have some tricks to speed it up, but usually we just laugh sheepishly and agree, “Yeah, Magento isn’t the fastest when it comes to importing …”, but we don’t really have a good solution for them. And even worse, merely finding the cause of the slow imports has proven to be quite a task. Fortunately, over the past few years, we’ve collected a large number of tools which can help us get to the bottom of this.

Deze post is ook beschikbaar in het Nederlands: Magento imports versnellen.

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