Magento Hosting

[Darren]

Hi guys, after working hard over the last few weeks we've been working hard to get Magento (an open source shopping cart system) working as fast as possible on our servers. It tends to be a very heavyweight application, and if not configured correctly, performance can be less than impressive. If you want to install Magento on your cluster account (for scalability) let us know and we can help you tweak the configuration to achieve optimum performance.

Here is our demo store: http://magentodemo.co.uk.gridhosted.co.uk

In your Magento installation, we recommend setting the cache directory in app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/App.php

And replacing the line:

'cache_dir'=>Mage::getBaseDir('cache'),

with

'cache_dir'=> '/tmp',

And also

'file_name_prefix' => 'mage',

With a random character string, for example:-

'file_name_prefix' => 'mage65jhsde7',

We also recommend storing sessions in the database, rather than the file system. Very shortly, we will be looking at implementing ramdisks for the cache to further speed up performance.

You can read more about Magento here: http://www.magentocommerce.com

[Rich]

Hi Darren ramdisks for cache is very exciting!!

We have been fighting Magento speed for quite a while now...

[Darren]

Hi Rich - this could be a reality within the next week. Our new storage we hope to put live within the next 24 hours which will takeaway these intermittent issues we've been having lately, as well as supporting fast cache devices so that Magento performance and other similar scripts perform a lot more quickly on the cluster.

You can see http://magento.tsohost.co.uk which is the untweaked performance of a demo Magento store on our cPanel hosting. But it is better than the cluster at present for Magento - this should change once we make the above changes.

If you want to really get Magento shining, however, I would recommend a well specified dedicated server using SSDs (4 in RAID 10 would be my suggestion). This way, you can then run PHP as DSO, as well as Zend server to improve performance even further. If this is something you're interested in, let us know and we can quote for a setup.

[Darren]

So if you'd like to do some comparisons...

http://magento.tsohost.co.uk - hosted on one of our standard cPanel servers. It's no slouch, it has 2 Nehalem Xeons for 16 virtual CPUs, 12GB RAM, and 8 x 10K RPM SAS hard disks.

http://magentodemo.co.uk.gridhosted.co.uk - hosted on the cluster, after a few of the storage platform changes.

Both installations should be absolutely identical in files and database and other tweaks (same php.ini and .htaccess files). We haven't made any Magento specific changes yet, but hopefully it's a good baseline performance. As I said, we may be able to offer supercharged Magento hosting on SSDs or similar at some point in the future.

[Rich]

Congrats Darren, that is a very significant performance improvement!

FYI a nice blog has just been posted on Magento's blog:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/...performance-1/

Rich

[vjmag]

'file_name_prefix' => 'mage',

With a random character string, for example:-

'file_name_prefix' => 'mage65jhsde7',

I wonder if two people setup Magento like above what will happen?

[vjmag]

'cache_dir'=>Mage::getBaseDir('cache'),

with

'cache_dir'=> '/tmp',

I tried this and the performance really good. Thanks for your effort to help us!

[Adam_Smith]

Originally Posted by vjmag

'file_name_prefix' => 'mage',

With a random character string, for example:-

'file_name_prefix' => 'mage65jhsde7',

I wonder if two people setup Magento like above what will happen?

If someone sets their file name prefix to mage65jhsde7 then there will be a caching conflict and Magento will probably error. This is why you set something completely random .

[vjmag]

Few days ago I tried my site and it showed installation page instead of showing home page. At present my site is in initial stage so didn't worry.

It might be some problem in cloud and could be plenty of reasons why Magento responded installation page where it was fully installed before.

After few minutes the home page came up.

It will be better showing error page.

Thanks

[Adam_Smith]

This is very strange. If it happens again please get in touch. I don't think it's related to the cloud system but I'm sure we can find the cause for you.

[vjmag]

If app/etc/local.xml not available for some reason then Magento redirect the request to installation wizard.

Few days ago it happened to me when I checked the site. I was keep on hitting the browser for a while and the home page didn't turn up.

I decided to wait and after 5 minutes the home page turned up.

Few minutes outage wouldn't do any harm than allowing customers to reinstall!

So I found a way to prevent this.

Install folder under app/code/core/Mage must be renamed so that installtion wizard will not show up to customers!

[Darren]

One thing to consider is that local.xml should always have the correct permissions set. I would always recommend checking these manually, as often Magento upgrades and the like can change permissions that you've set yourself. local.xml (containing your database connection details) should be CHMOD 700.

[Darren]

Try adding this to your .htaccess in your main Magento directory for (hopefully) a performance increase:-

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/atom_xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-php
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-fastphp
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-httpd-eruby

# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

</IfModule>

That should compress pretty much anything that can be compressed... if you're using the Firefox developer's tool bar, you'll probably see the average page size go from 300KB-600KB, right down to 100KB-250KB by doing this, which should make the site feel a lot snappier.

[Nizumzen]

Is there any news on the RAM disks at all for the cache?

[Adam_Smith]

There is a large RAM based cache on the storage nodes. Not a ramdisk as such but it does mean that frequently accessed files remain in RAM more than they would on 'normal' shared hosting.

[Nizumzen]

Originally Posted by Adam_Smith

There is a large RAM based cache on the storage nodes. Not a ramdisk as such but it does mean that frequently accessed files remain in RAM more than they would on 'normal' shared hosting.

Oki dokie. Thanks for the information.

[Rich]

Do you still recommend storing sessions in the database, rather than the file system?

What do you think of the speed of www.onesecurity.co.uk?

We have done everything we can to optimise the speed:

- Htaccess compression
- Minify
- /tmp

But it still feels worryingly slow..
What do you think?

Kind regards

Rich

[Adam_Smith]

Hi Rich,

Darren is our resident Magento expert so I'll ask him to have a look in the morning.

Magento as an application has an obscene amount of includes and file operations in its general use. On a clustered system this does hurt performance however the more busy your site is, the more our system caches the files rather than reading them from the NFS share. However even if your site receives very little traffic it should be possible to make it faster with a little tweaking.

I should point out that our clustered hosting scores very highly in Magento benchmarks, beating all but the dedicated hosting providers.

Regards,

Adam.

[Darren]

Hi Rich - your Magento site does seem a lot slower than it should be. Can you raise a ticket with the version of Magento you're running? Are you using a flat catalog (so that Magento doesn't have to do 100 MySQL queries per page...)?

[Rich]

Guys , just to give context, TSO are a simply awesome host. The grid is fantastic, but the real differenciator is the support.

Magento is clearly a slow hungry application, and I appreciate all of your support.

Kind regards

Rich