Magento

The speed does need to go up, however I do not wish for speed to improve at the cost of Magento trademark features. Magento offers so much in the way of client/customer friendly interactivity that it is sick, giving OSC and Zen a real try firmed up my adoration for magento. I currently have a number of projects on hold for Magento Stable.

I was extremely excited to see the batch product interface previewed.

I look forward to developing in Magento for my clients.

Thanks,

tim.

i think you have to test Magento speed when more and more features will be added. For example when it will support more complex pricing rules or rules for show custom personilized content to the end user. It is different to just grab a price from a table than to calculate it by using advanced logic.

My company runs a music store e-commerce site. Is it possible for Magento to support such a site from within the admin and without custom hacks on the code (or extension of the code)?

I’m new to Magento and definitely agree with an earlier post on who exactly will be using Magento. Initially when I was told about Magento and the capabilities I was under the impression I had found the ‘Holy Grail’ of ecommerce, but now have become very discouraged because of this tread. Not to say I will give up hope on Magento, but speed is one of our main concerns. And like mentioned before, people like myself who are limited in the aspects of Linux and all the other very technical things that are associated with trying to make it faster is not a realistic proposition.
My situation is the perfect example. We are a small company with a few ecommerce stores that are doing well and now its time to grow. I’m not a tech, but control alot of the aspects of the shopping cart, etc. enough to get by. I wont have time to learn all the technical stuff, we need something out of the box that is gonna rock our socks with simplicity and speed. I think the main beta testers should be idiots like myself and others to throw in stupid comments on how this and that are limited, then its up to people that are smart as hell (like the people on this tread) to implement it into the program.
Think about installing windows now a days. Its a no brain-er and works great.
Now having said that...for the love of GOD get this thing faster and working perfectly. The only reason I responded to this tread is to encourage the Magento team to ‘get it done’ cause we (I) and I’m sure millions of others need this software to work 100%! I’m grinding my teeth at night trying to come up with solutions for our ecommerce dilemma!
Please do not take this as a negative comment or feedback, just trying to help in any way I can.

Keep up the good work! 

Daniel

Top Tip Alert!!!

You have tried speeding up the server, but have you tried speeding up the client?

The front end works a treat with cache enabled, the back end is a tad sluggish. Agreed?

To speed up general responsiveness try turning on pipelining in the client, i.e. Firefox.

It does not help that much with huge category trees or attributes with 500+ options, however, lots of the other admin pages are distinctively quicker, when compared to the default FF settings. They also seem quicker…

A quick Google generally returns a version of the following, however, others suggest ‘8’ instead of ‘30’ for max requests and not using the ‘draw it quicker’ option:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

Hi all, apologies for going back to posts from last year and not talking about speed (exactly), but I really want to say something that may or may not be useful for the Magento team to hear.

Ron Seigel - 16 September 2007 03:33 PM

Magnus Wester - 11 September 2007 12:02 AM

I frequently see people expecting to run Magento-class software in shared hosting environments, or in 128MB VPS solutions. That’s just ignorance.

True “ignorance” is really believing that everyone that wants to use Magento will be willing to pay for a dedicated box. The vast majority of users down the road will most definitely be using it in a shared hosting environment.

What always blows me away is the early adopters (as in all the techno-geeks here - myself included) honestly believing that they’re going to be the “average” user. Nothing could be further from the truth. The average user is going to be a small time operation that just wants to sell their “stuff” on the web and likes that fact that Magento is everything they could ever need. ................

Couldn’t agree more. I am in the unusual postition of having been an IT person some 17 years ago (yes, pre-internet), who now know very little about e-commerce or internet site coding in any form. So I have an opinion. If the average user (and I’m now almost one of them) isn’t taken into account, all you have is half a package. To make it a whole package it would need to be sold as a developers tool. But I don’t think that is the idea behind Magento.

jlaha - 16 September 2007 11:38 PM

I certainly hope that the average user hoping to utilize Magento is well versed in XHTML, CSS, some PHP, Linux system administration and has the ability to understand why Magento’s layout and templating system is the way it is, the feature which has the highest learning curve in my opinion.

I think the “small timers” who “just want to sell their stuff” should probably stick to something remotely hosted and FAR MORE simple like Shopify.  If not, Varien is going to have to hire a full time forum manager to constantly re-categorize posts into the newbie category and we’re all screwed!

No, no, no! If Magento can only be used by the kind of people you mention, it will not survive.

Believe me, as one of the ‘small timers’ you mention, I most certainly do not want Shopify or the like. They have their market, and it is for folk who want NO involvement with the site at all (or very minimal), but don’t want to pay £100(0)’s / $100(0)’s for a developer. They also want want anything free (as it wouldn;t be user friendly enough).

The world does not consist of only IT savy folk / developers (such as yourself I imagine) and uninterested users. There is a middle ground. It is this middle ground that makes Zen Cart worthwhile. But Zen Cart is looking old already. I had really hoped Magento would step in here. There is a niche, and it’s not filled yet.

This is not a rant at the poster (sorry if it appears that way), just something I hope someone from Magento sees....

jlaha - 16 September 2007 11:38 PM

Overall, I see Magento as a tool for developers rather than a software for end users.

If this is the case then Magento need to make this very clear and direct the software towards them. And therefore it needs to be super fast.

Hopefully the following can help a lot:

1. Compress JS, CSS and HTML
2. Instead of calling 15 different JS, just call 1 “Common” JS which includes all the others
3. Instead of calling 5 different CSS, just call 1 “Common” CSS which includes all the others

using firebug’s net requests tool, it’s easy to see why it takes so long to load

base magento requests

26kb html
59kb css
259kb js
242kb images

this is taken from the demo site off magento’s site, so i take it this is a base install.

imho:

the images on the home page could be compressed a lot more (240kb for what i see is way too much). this will probably come / change when people modify their own magento base installs --- it’s what you make of it. i don’t see this as a magento problem. a page of 75-100k is very likely after customization.

also from what i see on the home page, 59k is quite a bit too much for the css. this can probably easily be cut to 15-20k. from what i learned from race cars is that every little bit of weight helps. the same applies here. 20k here, 20k there… eventually you have 250k gone for good.

259k for js is where magento is falling quickly off the cliff -------- BUT these appear to be full source code versions, un-minified and un-compressed. this number should go down significantly after minification and compression. looking on jquery’s site as an example, the full source version is 94k, but mini’d and gzip’d its 15k. hell just packed it still goes down to 29k. i dont think <100k is out of the question for magento’s scripts. and saying what the guy said just before me, knocking down requests would help drastically too.

584kb
- 150k images
- 40k css
- 150k js
--------
240k

add in caching after that… magento should be quite a bit swifter than it is now, retaining all of the current features. i just pray to the big guy it will come compressed like this in the final version, i don’t want to go gzip’ing and minifying and compressing all the base scripts every time a new version is released, or really even on a base install. compression like this should be expected in the base.

jlaha - 16 September 2007 11:38 PM

Overall, I see Magento as a tool for developers rather than a software for end users.

However, I think it’s inevitable that we will see a large number of sites with the exact same default layout with a couple colors changed, a few image replacements (logo), and terrible product images.

Time will tell.

I agree!!!!!

Speed and quick page load times are now increasing important now that Google has outwardly said they factor page load time into their Quality Score for Adwords landing pages.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/03/landing-page-load-time-will-soon-be.html

So I hope Magento can be cutting edge in this aspect as well.  There is already a great framework in place for caching, but we still need to improve the initial page load time.

I have been watching this software since the first preview. Holding off two major projects in the hope we can move away from current solution and use Magento (too many years with Interchange).

My specialty is the user experience so especially concerned with performance issues. What bothers me so far is the heavy pages, multiple hits for bloated js/css and use of prototype instead of something lighter like jquery or stripped down mootools on the frontend. I have to wonder why this would be included in a demo that is supposed to show of the speed of the software. All this adds just a little doubt as to the efficiency of the underlying code.

I’m hoping some of the earlier posters who brought up issues with structure/# of queries can revisit this thread and let us know if they have seen improvements since then.

Also helpful would be if Magento can let us know what they have scaled to on the demo site and where the bottlenecks are occuring (and how they will be fixed)? They have probably seen as many as most merchants can expect.

Still we’re giving the benefit of the doubt to Magento and withholding any judgments until we can look over and start kicking the tires on a RC (or maybe as soon as 0.90). Thanks for the great work so far and hoping to help get this from beta to an enterprise class system. The open source world is overdue for something this smart.

Thanks,
Alex

In 2 weeks the production version is released. With the speed of the current beta release it is ofcourse not possible to use this software for a real store. I think it is impossible to buyin adwords with the current beta release. The qualityscore that adwords uses (is going to use) makes prices of keywords unaffordable. It is also hard to attract the visitors true the organic results of search engines. Unfortunately a lot of (/most) people are not willing to wait 10 seconds or more for loading a website. With the speed of the current release you need a very high conversionrate to compensate that loss. The developers know this ofcourse, so they probably working hard on this shortcoming. I mean...looking at the current releases of Magento we can all see that the developers know a lot about usability. Because the speed of the website is a usabilty issue, I know this has to have a high priority for the production release. Keep up the good work

I hope that will increase a lot the speed of Magento, and not make just a little difference… Would you have more info about the release date of the production version ?

Magento first stable version is scheduled for the end of this month. That’s what Magento team said on the blog.

It would be nice if they would give us some kind of indication of the odds of a speed increase with the production release (and how much of an increase in speed they expect). They have acknowledged that speed is an issue, but I can’t find anywhere where they are giving any kind of substantial assurances as to the speed improving with the production release.  It’s certainly a “deal-breaker” for most people, and being that we’re only 2 weeks away from the estimated release of 1.0, I think some people are starting to get a little worried. I know I am.

i have only the speed problems when i push to add to cart, it takes more than 30s to refresh the page :(