To over this and improve admin area performance we can disable automatic updating of indexes. With default settings, when adding or modifying products, Magento have to update multiple indexes. These indexes may include “Product Attributes” index, “products prices” index and few others.

To avoid this, we can change the index update mode to manual. This will not update indexes automatically at time of modifying products, so the changes may not reflect on frontend. After modifying products admin will have to update these indexes manually.

Here is how you can change index update mode

• Login to admin area
• Go to “Index Management” page through “System > Index Management”
• Select indexes you want to change. If you are not sure which one to select than select all.
• Select “Change Index Mode” from “actions” drop down. Selecting this will show another dropdown “Index Mode”.
• Select “Manual Update” from “Index Mode” dropdown.
• Click “Submit” button.
• You will see message like “Total of X index(es) have changed index mode.”

This should make adding and modifying products significantly fast. Be careful that you update these indexes after modifying the products other wise your changes will not reflect on front end. Updating these indexes can be done from same page that is “Admin > System > Index Management” page.

The mysql server has to do a lot of things like adding and updating records at high frequency, manage locks, conflicts etc etc. If we can get our server free from read only queries it can perform updates and other operations at fast pace. MySQL provides feature of Master Slave replication for this purpose.

In master slave replication a server called Master takes care of all updates, schema changes etc etc and let other servers take care of queries which only need to read data. Once replication is set slave server keep its self synced with master (its enough to know at the moment, in some other post will explain master slave replication in detail).

Back to topic, we can add a slave server to share load with other server. To add read server in Magento you will need to edit the config file app/etc/local.xml. You will a block of <default_setup> in which details of main or master server are there. You can add new server by following code
<default_read>
<connection>
<host><![CDATA[host]]></host>
<username><![CDATA[useronslave]]></username>
<password><![CDATA[secret]]></password>
<dbname><![CDATA[dbname]]></dbname>
<active>1</active>
</connection>
</default_read>

This will shift the load of read queries on slave server and give more space to breath on master server. For more refer to Magento’s official documentation.

For better performance and results, “Fulltext” should be selected in this configuration. You can configure selection time by going to System » Catalog » Catalog Search » Search Type in Magento admin panel.

Fulltext searching feature is implemented with mysql fulltext searching. Fulltext search allows to make complex search against any text.

For fulltext searching Magento uses separate index maintained in MyISAM engine as InnoDB engine does not support fulltext indexes. Once you have enabled fulltext searching you should ensure that “Catalog Search Index” index is up to date. This can be done from System» Index Management and clicking on “Reindex Data” against “Catalog Search Index”.

More on Magento Performance

So its good idea to dedicate a separate web server for admin panel operations. This way one may customize certain setting for admin area. This can be done by having a synced copy of Magento code on moth servers, and setting the admin url to new server. Option can also be configured during install.

More on Magento Performance

Realpath Cache:

A lot of file I/O is done to run Magento site. This file I/O can be improved with faster hard disk. There is more can be done to improve this. PHP configuration allows to configure size of memory which can be used to cache realpaths, which help improve file I/O. The configuration is “realpath_cache_size”. Increase its value give more cache space.
Also increase the value for “realpath_cache_ttl” to 3600 to 7200 to increase the time of cache.

Memory Limit

Also its good idea to increase page memory limit to be used by PHP. You can increase it by increasing value of “memory_limit” configuration.

Remove unused extentions

See if you disable any unused php extension to save some more memory. There few extension which are used by Magento in default installations. These include PDO_MYSQL, simplexml, mcrypt, hash, gd, dom, iconv2, SOAP (list may increase in case of more Magento extensions and features.). If server is running other site please check required extensions for those as well.

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Disclaimer: Above recommendations are extracted based on “Magento Enterprise Edition Whitepaper” and my prior knowledge so no liabilities are accepted. Be sure the benchmark and adjust values according to your environment.

To overcome this disadvantage Magento can put all data in a separate single table and fetch it from there when needed. Using this can give significant improvement in performance for catalogs of 1000+ products.

Here is how you can enable this feature.
First build or reindex “Product Flat Data” index from
Admin Panel->System->Index Management and click “Reindex Data” against “Product Flat Data”. After building index go to Admin Panel -> System -> Configuration -> Frontend and select “Yes” against “Use Flat Catalog Product”. You only need to enable this option once, but you may need to rebuild index data periodically unless “Index Mode” is set to “Update on Save”.

Same is to be done to enable flat categories.

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There are several configurations which should be considered.

• Memory
  Magento uses InnoDB storage engine which, uses memory pools to cache tables data, indexes to reduce disk I/O. Less disk I/O means faster access to data, indexes etc.

  The key is to assign as much memory as possible for in-memory cache. By default this value is 8MB which is very small. This value can be increased by setting “innodb_buffer_pool_size” variable in my.cnf. On normal servers running web and database server, with 1GB RAM the value should be set to 256MB or 512MB. If server is only running database server than this value should not be less than 512MB.

• Multi-threading
  Innodb can use multiple cores of server processors to give concurrent connection. The key is to use this ability to boost concurrent connections. This can be achieved by configuring “innodb_thread_concurrency”, “thread_cache_size” variables properly.

  Magento recommends to calculate “innodb_thread_concurrency” value by equation “2 x [# of CPUs] + 2″. So on a server with 4 cores the value should be 10. The “thread_cache_size” allows to cache one client’s thread to be cached and used for another client after first is disconnected. This value can also be configured, but its value depends on “max_connections”.
  This is complex setting so seek mysql expert opinion and benchmark performance for setting it.

• Enable Query Cache
  MySQL can cache results for queries and return it from cache, when identical query is done. For example queries running for home page will be almost identical for another home page view. Enabling the cache can save a lot of rework on MySQL end.

  The cache can be enabled by setting “query_cache_size” variable. At least this value should be set equivalent to 32MB to 64MB in bytes. Setting this value can be tricky as available resources very in each environment, so be sure to benchmark and test before finalizing.

• Enable Sort Buffer
  Sort buffer is used to optimize sorting in ORDER BY and GROUP BY clause queries. Make sure that this buffer is enabled. Recommended value is 2MB to 6MB. This will speed up queries involving sort and GROUP BY.

More on Magento Performance

Disclaimer: Above recommendations are extracted based on “Magento Enterprise Edition Whitepaper” and my prior knowledge so no liabilities are accepted. Be sure the benchmark and adjust values according to your environment.

In my opinion its performance has been under heavy criticism unjustifiably, because there are a lot of rich features which come at some cost. Magento is continuously improving on performance, and have come along way on from it initial releases.

It provides a lot of features and guidelines to make a Magento site faster like multilevel cache, indexing etc etc. Due to lack of knowledge about these features, many small and medium vendors hesitate migrating to it.

I thought its a good idea to write about different optimization techniques which make Magento faster.
Here are links for posts of this series:

1. Optimizing your MySQL server
2. Enable Flat Products and Categories
3. Fine Tuning PHP Configurations
4. Admin area on separate server
5. Search Type Selection
6. Adding more MySQL Servers
7. Speed up admin area with Manual Index Mode

Stay tuned for more in this series to make your faster. Remember faster sites create happier customers.

Solr is very similar to SPHINX. You can find more about Solr at http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ and to find more excited features of new Magento see http://www.magentocommerce.com/.

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