Magento

Hi all!

Since upgrading to Magento 1.6 it appears as though our site has slowed significantly taking over 20 sec to load a category page. I know that Magento is not known for speed but the 1.4.1.1 install used to load a category page in around 6 sec, still slow but not nearly as slow as post 1.6 upgrade.

Our server hardware is more than capable;

Dedicated Server
Intel Xeon X3440 - Quad Core 2.53GHz, 8MB Cache, Intel VT
Hardware Raid 1 (Mirror)
cPanel for Linux
4 x 300GB SAS 15k
CentOS 5.x 64bit
12GB DDR3 - 1333 ECC

We are showing 50 products per page. After upgrading to 1.6.0.0 page load time increased to over 20sec with the same exact configuration.

I upgraded via ssh using pear to go from 1.4.1.1 to 1.6.0.0.

Actions i’ve taken so far to no avail…
- Performed a mysql DB check all tables returned OK.
- Compared DB to fresh install DB using Magento’s DB checker tool and it repaired some missing indexes in the core_url_rewrite table, I then truncated that table and ran the reindex to repopulate. Everything works, still slow though.
- Duplicated the entire DB and installed a fresh 1.6.0.0 install (with no modules, themes or anything) and set the local.xml to point to copied db, stock install still takes approx 20 sec to load category page.

Despite the above efforts and countless hours of forum trolling. Same performance issue exists.

Is this normal? 1.6.0.0 is just so much slower than 1.4? Surely it can’t be normal to take ~20sec for a stock magento install to load a category page.

We have just over 8,000 products in our system, approx 4,000 of which are visible on the front end. We do have quite a lot of attributes that users can navigate with on category pages.

Category pages with larger amounts of products take longer to load. Time to first byte on home page is around 1.8sec and on category pages is over 20 seconds with 1.6. On 1.4 time to first byte on a category page was approx 4 seconds and around 1.5 sec on homepage.

Caching is on, indexes are built and config is set to use flat tables. Is 1.6 handled differently to 1.4? Should i be tweaking php and mysql? We are running php 5.2.17, http://www.kinkyminx.com.au/phpinfo.php

Has anybody experienced this or have any suggestions at all?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

To anybody else experiencing this issue. I got some help from the experts at Magepro Apps who tracked it down to our PHP Opcode cache eAccelerater not playing nice with Magento 1.6, it was reporting a zero for the number of scripts cached, turns out that versions of eAccelerator after 0.9.5.3 dropped support for the PHP commands used by certain PHP software. I had 0.9.6.1 installed.

After uninstalling eAccelerator and installing APC we experienced a 10 fold improvement.

Hi Guys

I upgraded succesfully from 1.5 to 1.6.1.0, and yes, the shop was very very slow!
After installing APC now works pretty fine… my apc.shm_size is tuned on 512M

and yours?

We actually had to get rid of APC as we started to notice conflict issues with Source Guardian which we require to use Zend Optimiser, now we are using eAccelerator set to 256mb.

Although, i must say our first load time is still not as good as it was back when we were running magento 1.4. I am starting to suspect that perhaps magento 1.6 has been geared to work better with php 5.3, our server is running Magento 5.2.17… its just a hunch though, i think i will try rebuilding apache with php 5.3 to see how it goes. Ill report my results here.

Did anybody find out what’s causing the slow category pages?

We have exact same issue. Upgraded from 1.5 and have the same issue on both 1.6 and 1.7.

Categories that will load in a couple of seconds on 1.5 will take 10-20 seconds to load on 1.6/1.7.

It doesnt seem to be a php version, javascript, or image problem which has been suggested many times around the web. When I test the dev site on webpagetest.org I get Time to First Byte: 8210 ms so it is just waiting for something for 8 seconds then everything loads quickly.

I’m wondering if it could be a core code error that is causing something to be loaded unnecessary or contentiously. We had a similar issue related to price rules when we upgraded to 1.5 so we had to comment out a line in the core code which solved the problem instantly. I saw in the release notes that there was a fixed issue with “category is loaded very slowly” related to the new functions to the Price Navigation Step calculation. Can anybody tell me how to remove the call for price calculations completely, not just the display of it, but how to prevent Magento from looking for it?

Thanks, any tips or ideas is very much appreciated!

I have the same kind of problem.
My old store is running on 1.3.2 and the new store on 1.7
Unfortunately the new site is so much slower than the old site (with same amount of products and categories on the same server).

Loading the static text pages is fast, but loading the grid pages is very slow. When the grid shows only a few products is rather fast, but when it shows 30 products it is really slow again.

I hope we can find a solution.

Hi chuckyss, \"glad\" to hear someone else is experiencing this. I\’ve been working with my host Nexcess who also did the upgrade, for many weeks now but so far they have not been able to identify the issue. I managed to narrow it down somewhat by making several different category scenarios, and it seems the problem only occurs for configurable products that are in stock and have associated simple products.

If I set all the configurable products in the category to \"out of stock\” the category loads very quickly. I would be interested in knowing if this is also the case for you?

hi guys read my signature.

Hey, papimaui! thanks for sharing! I’m gonna try out your solution.
Will let you know how it works

RoseT - 15 August 2012 02:34 AM

Hey, papimaui! thanks for sharing! I’m gonna try out your solution.
Will let you know how it works

Hi RoseT, fyi it is not a solution just a step to narrow the issue down. Look forward to hearing what you find. Thanks!

hi, papimaui! I tried setting the configurable products to\"out of stock\” , but for me it didn’t work…
Sorry to bring bad news…

RoseT - 20 August 2012 12:12 AM

hi, papimaui! I tried setting the configurable products to\"out of stock\” , but for me it didn’t work…
Sorry to bring bad news…

Thanks for checking RoseT.