Why is Magento so slow? [closed]

Answer 1

There are many reasons why your Magento shopping cart could be running slow but no excuses for there is a variety of ways to eleviate the problem and make it pretty darn fast. Enabling Gzip by modifying your htaccess file is a start. You can also install the fooman speedster extension. The type of server used also will determine the speed of your store. More tips and a better explanation here http://www.interactone.com/how-to-speed-up-magento/

Answer 2

Magento is very slow because the database design is not very good. The code is a mess and very hard to update and optimize. So all optimizations are done via cache instead of code.

On the other hand. It is a webshop with a lot of tools. So if you need a flexible webshop just buy a very powerfull server and you will be ok.

Answer 3

it will also come down to functionality versus performance.

Raw performance is gained using nginx, php-fpm, memcached, apc and a proper designed server.

Functionality like plesk and magento performance could be managed by taking the entire infrastructure in perspective when designing a magento performance cloud.

Answer 4

Switching from Apache to LiteSpeed helped us a lot. In addition to: Editing MySQL's settings, installing Fooman Speedster (module to compress/combine js and css files), and installing APC. Magento has also posted a white paper on how to get the best performance out of the enterprise edition, but it is equally applicable to the other versions: http://www.magentocommerce.com/whitepaper/

Answer 5

I'm more involved in the managed server optimization in my company but I may have a few tips for you. First, you can look at the code more closely using the code tracing feature of Zend server. It will allow you to see where and when the things get dirty.

I totally share benlumley's consideration regarding the cache. Most of the sites we host doesn't even have the block caching enable. This cache has to be explicitly called and not "assumed". So if you code hasn't yet took part of this mechanism, it's something you definitely want to try. If you have a EE version, you can get the Full page up in order to get the best of the beast.

A reverse proxy will also help a lot. It'll cache the static ressources, significantly lowering the pressure on the php interpretation stack of your front servers.

Don't forget to write the sessions & Magento cache to a RAM disk. This will also definitely get you to another level of performances.

There's still a lot to be said here but I'm running out of time. You have to know that a good site, well coded in a 1.4.1 CE version, running on a 2x5650 Xeon + 16 GB RAM server and having a Rproxy on top can take up to 50 000 unique visitors a day with smooth pages to everybody.

Answer 6

I've only been tangentially involved in optimizing Magento for performance, but here's a few reasons why the system is so slow

1. Parts of Magento use an EAV database system implemented on top of MySQL. This means querying for a single "thing" often means querying multiple rows

2. There's a lot of things behind the scenes (application configuration, system config, layout config, etc.) that involve building up giant XML trees in memory and then "querying" those same trees for information. This takes both memory (storing the trees) and CPU (parsing the trees). Some of these (especially the layout tree) are huge. Also, unless caching is on, these tree are built up from files on disk and on each request.

3. Magento uses its configuration system to allow you to override classes. This is a powerful feature, but it means anytime a model, helper, or controller is instantiated, extra PHP instructions need to run to determine if an original class file or an override class files is needed. This adds up.

4. Besides the layout system, Magento's template system involves a lot of recursive rendering. This adds up.

In general, the Magento Engineers were tasked, first and foremost, with building the most flexible, customizable system possible, and worry about performance later.

The first thing you can do to ensure better performance is turn caching on (System -> Cache Management). This will relieve some of the CPU/disk blocking that goes on while Magento is building up its various XML trees.

The second thing you'll want to do is ensure your host and operations team has experience performance tuning Magento. If you're relying on the $7/month plan to see you through, well, good luck with that.