Hi all,

Has anyone else faced this issue with Magento search?

I am running my store on 512 MB RAM and have a catalog of around 4000 products. Now on the search I observe that the more the products, the slower the search. On looking at it further, I guess, the Magento attempts to load all attributes of all the search results.

Explaining further, if my search results in 100 hits, Magento seems to be loading all the search related attributes of all the hundred products which seems to be a time consuming process. Ideally Magento should only retrieve the attributes of the products displayed on the page.

Had anyone else faced/investigated this issue?

Moreover Magento being based out of EAV model offers little scope of optimization on search what with all those attributes being queried from various sources and is this not an architecture constraint on Magento to improve its search capabilities? Has Magento sacrificed performance for flexibility?

I’ve done a brief sample of tests on Magento’s performance using a large catalog (2000 Categories, 30000+ Products).  I’m running v1.0 on a Windows Vista machine using the php module with an apache web server (see Specs below).  I ran the XDebug PHP Profiler on a sample of page requests and used WinCacheGrind to parse and analyze the results.  For more instructions on getting XDebug set up and to view the results, visit the projects website at http://www.xdebug.org/docs/.

Some background on the customizations to my Magento Installation:
I modified the home page to have a list of categories on the left just as there is in the default template on the catalog/category pages using the same exact catalog/navigation block (Mage_Catalog_Block_Navigation).  So that’s why the load times on the home page are a bit longer than usual.

Page Requests:
1.) Home Page with Catalog Navigation Block
2.) Catalog Category View (Second Level Category)
3.) Home Page with Catalog Navigation Block
4.) Catalog Category View (Third Level Category)
5.) Catalog Cateogry View (Top Most Category)
6.) Home Page without Catalog Navigation Block

(The numbers correspond to the cachegrind.out# output files)

Top 5 Slowest Magento Functions (In alphabetical order):

-Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Mysql4_Product_Collection->_afterLoad()
-Mage_Core_Block_Abstract->toHtml() (slow because of child functions called inside this one)
-Mage_Core_Block_Template->fetchView() (slow because of child functions called inside this one)
-Varien_Data_Tree_Dbp->addChildNodes() (Veeerrryyyy Slow with lots of categories)
-Varien_Simplexml_Element->extendChild()

I hope these functions get revisited and improved in an upcoming release because I really like Magento and if the performance issues can get worked out, then I think Magento will overtake all other open source shopping carts.

Link to Download the Cachegrind files:
http://rapidshare.com/files/111061427/XDebug.zip.html

I’ve created a new wiki page with the aim of providing some background to factors which affect web stack performance and where to look for tweaks and alternatives.

Hopefully this will become a place where explanations of performance issues can be keep up to date, and used as reference when advising on potential improvements.

It should also provide a valuable resource for people to use to find ways to improve the performance of their own web stack.

Ideally it will concentrate on the platform rather than the Magento application itself as those concerns would be better catalogued elsewhere.

Please add your own ideas and experiences!

I think it would be helpful when we are talking about performance if it is possible for everyone to know how the benchmarks are being done… and be able to duplicate the benchmark testing, or identify ways of imrpoving the benchmarking of performance and identify performance issues.

Could we start a Wiki article on “Performance Testing” where there is basically a guide on how to setup the benchmark, sample databases, and configuration settings. I think this will help everyone set a baseline as a starting point for indentifying performance. This way if someone makes some configuration changes, or alters their benchmark we’ll be able to see the difference and describe it.

I’ve been focusing on doing some load testing with Magento.

My test catalog has about 60 000 products, I have noted so far some major speed issues on the following frontend areas:
- tags performance: each product having 2 custom tags, the system takes minutes to calculate the tag cloud
- product search, from the search box on the top left corner: the global product search takes minutes to give the results. This is probably slowed down because many attributes are included in the search.

I am wondering if others had similar or other speed related issues ?