Magento

After creating the bulk of my theme on a local server (pentium 3 with 512 ram running debian), I moved everything to our host.

My local server wasn’t really fast at coughing up the pages, but atleast it was pretty consistently slow throughout the entire website so I could just point the finger at my slow setup. Since I’ve moved to my host, all pages load almost instantaneous.  Usually in a second. Even adding to the cart is done in 4-5 seconds. Considering some of the numbers I’ve heared around here, I was very happy with those speeds.

However.. when loading the home page, especially after a period of no activity on the website, it will take 15, 20 or even 30 seconds to load. While I’m not even loading products on there, just flat text that I’ve entered in the CMS page and a category menu on the left side. I’m also logged out so it’s not loading my cart or wishlist.

This seems to be entirely related to page generation, as for the majority of those 15-30 seconds, nothing appears to be happening, no loading bar filling. You get a feeling that the site is down.

Could the necessary period of website inactivity point to the fact that this is a cache problem? I’ve also tried disabling it but the problem seems to persist.

(I’ve also tried changing Proxy.php, to no avail.)

Could anyone from the magento team narrow it down a bit? Cause a load time like that is a showstopper and will force us to wait for a fix :(

The home page loads all the javascript the first time and that takes a lot of time ... try to load firebug extension for firefox and see the page load times ...it will show the time taken for CSS content, JS content separately

Firebug will only show transfer speed though.. the problem lies in page creation. The transfer of the js files only takes 77ms.

First load after a period of inactivity:

Santiago, Chile (760 Kbps) 21.59s
Dortmund, Germany (5 Mbps) 17.69s
Los Angeles, CA (1.5 Mbps) 21.58s
Beijing, China (5 Mbps) 21.06s
Detroit, MI (5 Mbps) 22.03s
Chicago, IL (45 Mbps) 14.11s
St. Petersburg, Russia (5 Mbps) 24.27s
Gloucester, UK (5 Mbps) 21.63s
Sydney, Australia (5 Mbps) 21.94s

Second load

Santiago, Chile (760 Kbps) 5.64s
Dortmund, Germany (5 Mbps) 1.19s
Los Angeles, CA (1.5 Mbps) 2.61s
Beijing, China (5 Mbps) 5.89s
Detroit, MI (5 Mbps) 6.02s
Chicago, IL (45 Mbps) 3.23s
St. Petersburg, Russia (5 Mbps) 2.28s
Gloucester, UK (5 Mbps) 1.98s
Sydney, Australia (5 Mbps) 5.66s

(Server in Europe)

Could it be that missing an extension/addon that is listed here could cause these slowdowns without telling us anything is wrong?

Ben ...perhaps one of these maybe of use to you ....particularly “Load Time Analyzer” and “FirePHP”..
FirefoxAddons

And Yslow will be use to you too
YSlow

Thanks but all of them are client side so the only thing they point is how much gets transferred. The problem is in page creation, so before stuff is sent to the client.

Ben ...have you installed APC - bytecode cache ..I am sure this will resolve your page creation performance ...

Someone correct me on this if I’m wrong, but APC and Zend do not work together. It’s either a “one or the other” thing. If that’s the case, install Zend and eAccelerator. There’s no performance difference between APC and eAccelerator either.

Yeah thanks for the tips, I might give eAccelerator a go, APC didn’t do much on my home setup, but uhm, I have confidence in the server I’m running magento on, it doesn’t make any sense that you try to “speed up” a 20 second loading progress. It means something is VERY wrong, not just slow. Accelerators, caching, more hardware, they all try to solve the symptoms instead of the problem, I don’t like that approach..

Is it possible for someone from the magento team to tell us what is actually happening when nothing appears to be, I’m obviously not the only one with the problem.

Ben ...the home page also loads a lot of javascrip that is not used on the home page itself .. you may consider excluding them from loading -
Refer: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/6613/

I could be wrong but I don’t think javascripts have any effect on page creation, just transfer time.
I suspect it has something to do with mysql, I installed everything on my desktop yesterday and noticed that mysql was using my processor (well one of them atleast) completely, but nothing happend for a long time.

Log files aren’t showing anything however so I’m trying a clean install on my webhost again today..

I have the same exact problem here - page loads fast but sometimes in crating the homepage it blocks for 15-30 seconds. My Host told me that at those periods MySQL loads are very heavy so it just have to do with MySQL and not with JavaScript.

Ben, do you have a solution yet?

I did a post on this exact same issue some time ago aswell (was not aware of this post at the time), but no word from the Magento team.

To me it seems like a pretty serious problem, and I’m almost certain it has nothing to do with the size of the page/javascript/CSS. It is not the downloading that is taking time, but as Ben mentioned, a period of 15-20 seconds where apparently “nothing” is happening on initial load.

I perfectly understand that a store with thousands of products/categories and lots of traffic eventually will need a dedicated server, but a demo setup with only a few products and one simultaneous user should not have the same requirements in my opinion.

Crucial - 19 April 2008 11:12 PM

Someone correct me on this if I’m wrong, but APC and Zend do not work together. It’s either a “one or the other” thing. If that’s the case, install Zend and eAccelerator. There’s no performance difference between APC and eAccelerator either.

I’m really not an expert, but reading the magento blog here in the DIY section APC is recomended to use by the team.
What am I missing ?
thanks

Loïc - 30 May 2008 12:57 PM

Crucial - 19 April 2008 11:12 PM

Someone correct me on this if I’m wrong, but APC and Zend do not work together. It’s either a “one or the other” thing. If that’s the case, install Zend and eAccelerator. There’s no performance difference between APC and eAccelerator either.

I’m really not an expert, but reading the magento blog here in the DIY section APC is recomended to use by the team.
What am I missing ?
thanks

Yes, APC is a recommended opcode cache - however, it is not compatible with Zend Optimizer - which is quite common in shared hosting environments.  You can run APC without Zend Optimizer without problems.  You can run eAccellerator along side Zend Optimizer and in my testing eAcellerator has produced better results than APC.  APC has the additional issue in that it’s byte code optimizer is not stable and considered experimental at this time. 

I dont think the problem has to do with caching.  This is something that is MySQL related.  I am sure that if you watch ‘top’ from your shell you will find MySQL pegged using all available processing power.

Anyone care to share their MySQL config?  Perhaps mysqlreport my also show additional points of interest.

Have the same problem, but Worst. My initial page load takes over 50seconds. Everything is fine though if I’m not showing the new products on the homepage. http://www.epinvest.t-e-a.ro