This thread has gotten off topic. It’s really just about speed. If you can install it and it works well, run it. The bottom line is that if Magento works well in shared hosting environments, it will work well in dedicated hosting environments too. I just want the software to work well and it will probably be okay once it’s stable.
I’m also using a VPS with only 256MB of memory, but this is far to little for running Magento.
We are now considering to upgrade tot 1 GB memory or a new Dedicated Server.
Maybe we or the guys from Varien can put a list together with minimum server specification.
Reading this thread gives me the impression that some people actually manage to run Magento on a shared server, which is a VERY minimum requirement. There are more than one complete CMS solutions that many hosting providers refuse to run on shared servers. Of course, ina shared hosting setup, Magento will be very slow with more than a few concurrent users.
If you have problems running Magento on a 256 MB VPS, it’s probably because your response time requirements are higher, or because you have more users placing a higher load on the system. If you upgrade the VPS, remember to upgrade your database settings so that most of the added storage is used for database caching.
I would also like to voice a concern about the performance of Magento. I was eager to test Magento on my localhost, but once I ran Apache Benchmark on it my hopes were deflated. 1-2 requests per second is not acceptable. The same localhost running our existing ecomm gets 50+ requests per second. Can we expect that type of performance from Magento?
Performance is key for us and we expect it to greatly improve in the coming weeks. That said, please make sure you are running Magento in cached mode to see significant gains.
Ok, cool. Glad to know that someone is working on it. I ran it without caching and got 1.33 requests per second and 2.19 with caching turned on. Our ecomm solution is our own, but runs on the same technology (PHP,Apache,MySQL). These specific tests were run on a Mac Mini. Here is the ApacheBench output. I’m curious to know if Varien has run similar tests and what the results were?
root# ../bin/ab -c10 -n10 http://magento.dev/magento/ This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev <$Revision: 1.146 $> apache-2.0 Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/ Copyright 2006 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking magento.dev (be patient).....done
Server Software: Apache/2.2.3 Server Hostname: magento.dev Server Port: 80
Concurrency Level: 10 Time taken for tests: 4.557924 seconds Complete requests: 10 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 145320 bytes HTML transferred: 140120 bytes Requests per second: 2.19 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 4557.924 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 455.792 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 30.94 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 0 0.0 0 0 Processing: 4327 4470 80.8 4502 4557 Waiting: 4022 4355 146.4 4409 4519 Total: 4327 4470 80.8 4502 4557
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 4502 66% 4504 75% 4515 80% 4546 90% 4557 95% 4557 98% 4557 99% 4557 100% 4557 (longest request)
I’m a newbie to Megento, but I’ve been customizing X-Cart for years. It too was guilty of such bad SQL expressions such as “SELECT * FROM Tables” Along with very bad indexes. It has since been optimized and can handle quite a few concurrent users.
Some suggestions I can make without looking at the codebase… Yet!
Install IonCubes PHP Accelerator or Zend Accelerator.
Add php_flag zlib.output_compression On to your .htaccess file or httpd.conf file(s)
Use MyTop to keep an eye on any SQL Bottlenecks
Hopeful there isn’t any BLOB file storage going on in the Database, X-Cart made this same mistake and first and it caused a pretty big headache, eventually adding an option for Database or FileSystem storage.
9 times out of 10, the majority of bottlenecks are in the SQL execution, and setup.
I think Varien is working caching and that’s probably the fastest way to increase performance. It’s a waste of resources to query the database for product data that essentially does not change.
Fix that and you leave more resources for actual orders :D
This thread has gotten off topic. It’s really just about speed. If you can install it and it works well, run it. The bottom line is that if Magento works well in shared hosting environments, it will work well in dedicated hosting environments too. I just want the software to work well and it will probably be okay once it’s stable.
I don’t think it’s a server or connection issue.
Something that struck me immediately about magento is how long you have to look at a blank page for before anything happens.
Just out of curiosity, I timed the first 10 or so links in the ‘showoff’ thread. It varies between 10 and 20 seconds. During that time my browser status bar flickers between loading and waiting quite a few times.
My own test install on my own server is much the same, I have a 600kbps duplex connection, on a quad 2.66 server with 4gb RAM. There is no other traffic at all.
According to what I understand, 10 seconds is about the maximum you can keep any websurfer waiting. 20 seconds will kill you every time.
Maybe the index needs to be rearranged slightly so that at least a logo or something appears immediately - that at least will tell the surfer something is there. I’d say it’s a big risk to use this software commercially with that kind of lag.
I don’t know what to tell you, but my VPS installation has no such problems. It’s darn fast and has a small load because of all of the other stuff I run on it. I don’t have to wait 10 seconds for anything.
In fact, it’s faster now than it was when this thread began. The only reason I can think of is because I upgraded the RAM from 196kb to 448kb. I’m also running the same version. I have not upgraded yet.
I don’t know what to tell you, but my VPS installation has no such problems. It’s darn fast and has a small load because of all of the other stuff I run on it. I don’t have to wait 10 seconds for anything.
In fact, it’s faster now than it was when this thread began. The only reason I can think of is because I upgraded the RAM from 196kb to 448kb. I’m also running the same version. I have not upgraded yet.
So maybe it is just my connection.
I’d be interested to hear an opinion from a team member though - I have been through the pain of OScommerce, realised after doing a whole $#!7load of work that it wasn’t going to work for what I need. I haven’t done a lot of work with Magento so far as I’m still not sure it works. Am I completely wrong when I say it loads slowly?
Yep, its just your hosting.
I have tried hosting magento on variety of web hosts to test for speed and they all really vary company to company.
like for speed, simplehelix was by far the fastest i have seen on a shared hosting company.
it could be that they are a load balanced cluster hosting but for the price they are pretty good.
And, i dont think vps will really help you in terms of speeds unless you have atleast a 1gig of dedicated memory.
Some cases, vps are even slower than a shared hosting. Could be due to their shared network harddrives (NFS).
i already went down that route with media temple’s vps plan. =(
i think the key is to get the host that knows what they are doing, such as optimizing for memory.
and finding a load balanced hosting is also huge and this is why i say go with simplehelix.
Hmm. You might be mixing us up. Mine’s not hosted, it’s on my own server. The doubt about my connection was really relating to why every other site is slow to load. I am of course giving some benefit of the doubt - I don’t really thijnk there’s anything wrong with my connection, as no other websites seem to be particularly slow.
sdrio, i understand what you are saying.
and i agree with you that, magento is slower than other apps out there.
an app like oscommerce or cubecart is undoubtedly faster than magento at this stage.
it is this reason why i suggested that it might help to switch hosts.
because if you are hosted on a faster server, then it is possible that magento can run just as quick as other apps due to faster processing and faster network.
but from my research on magento, magento’s majority of the speed issue is at the images you have to download.
the first page alone, will serve around 500kb of data. so your down speed can also be an issue, especially if you are on the lower ranges of internet connection.
but all said and done, i am hoping that magento’s speed will improve with every each releases. in particular, im looking forward to their lighter template, which i think will solve most of the issues.
sdrio, i understand what you are saying.
and i agree with you that, magento is slower than other apps out there.
an app like oscommerce or cubecart is undoubtedly faster than magento at this stage.
it is this reason why i suggested that it might help to switch hosts.
because if you are hosted on a faster server, then it is possible that magento can run just as quick as other apps due to faster processing and faster network.
but from my research on magento, magento’s majority of the speed issue is at the images you have to download.
the first page alone, will serve around 500kb of data. so your down speed can also be an issue, especially if you are on the lower ranges of internet connection.
but all said and done, i am hoping that magento’s speed will improve with every each releases. in particular, im looking forward to their lighter template, which i think will solve most of the issues.
That makes good sense. I kinda wondered if that was the issue.
I might fiddle about and see what happens if I can break the page up - get something to appear quicker. I’ll report back…
