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Magento Optimization and Speed Problems

by Oscar Sodani
October 29, 2008
Today I'm replacing a ZenCart e-commerce store with a Magento based store. Magento is much slicker and nicer than ZenCart or OSCommerce, but the firest thing I noticed upon installation is that it is dog-slow, both on the front-end and the back-end. Here are some optimization tips that helped me increase the speed somewhat:

First, I made sure that I had mysql query caching turned on. A complete tutorial for this is available here.

More in-depth mySQL tweaking can be found here.

Notes from Magento are here.

 

UPDATE: In the end, I abandoned Magento. The speed problems never went away and the backend system kept hanging on me. The company's responses to the problems in the forums were non-existent. I hope they get their act together.

In the meantime, I'm using Prestashop, another open-source e-commerce application built on PHP and mySQL. It is blazing fast and easy to use, and while it doesn't have all the features of Magento, it is much better turn key solution for smaller stores.