Magento Hosting – Best Practices for Optimum Performance

A client who completes an order.

The number of orders processed during one second. Request Any HTTP communication sent by a client (browser, etc.) to a Magento server. This includes requests sent over HTTPS and is synonymous with an HTTP request.

Apache and Nginx are the two most popular HTTP servers used with Magento. Despite the performance numbers Nginx produces on a properly configured web server, Apache is very competitive when also properly configured. The important step to be considered is how PHP is initiated when running Apache. The standard configuration is to use mod_php and doing so can provide reasonable performance.

Apache with mod_php can be tuned to perform well on moderately loaded systems but for heavily loaded systems Apache with PHP-FPM is preferred. More importantly, however, Apache with PHP-FPM provides for full user separation that isn’t easily attainable using Apache with mod_php.

For this reason, we don’t recommend its use in high-performance environments and don’t explicitly entertain it in this whitepaper. We find most comparisons of Nginx and Apache (Compare Web Servers Type) are unbalanced because of this, as Nginx is benchmarked using PHP-FPM while Apache uses mod_php, suPHP, or some other non-PHP-FPM method of handing off PHP scripts to the PHP interpreter.

We benchmarked both Apache and Nginx with PHP-FPM. This keeps the comparison balanced.

Results:

The results depicted in Diagram 6 show, as the number of buyers and visitors increases, MySQL and Percona have fairly equal results (with a slight margin to Percona). This trend continues until the workload increased to 30 buyers and 3,000 visitors.

This is where Percona’s advantage became apparent. It continued to hold under an increased workload of 50 buyers and 5,000 visitors.

The second part of this test was run to calculate the maximum number of orders per second an MCE-SIP-200 cluster running Percona is capable of processing. Using Gatling, a buyer test without any simulated visitors was run.
Various amounts of buyers, from 750 to 3,000, were queued and run against the cluster to see how many orders by these buyers could be processed per second. A “buyer” in this test consists of the following sequence:

1. Navigate to the home page.
2. After which navigate to a category page.
3. Then to a product page
4. Add product to the cart.
5. View the cart.
6. Proceed through the checkout process fully using the check/money order payment method. Each calculated order is one user performing all of the above tasks successfully.

At the peak of 3,000 buyers, Magento is capable of processing 18.9 orders per second which equate to roughly 1.6 million orders per day.

• Run either Nginx or Apache with PHP-FPM. Both offer nearly identical performance utilizing PHP-FPM, but Apache benefits include better drop-in compatibility with Magento than Nginx. While Nginx requires more custom configuration to work with Magento, it does offer the built-in reverse proxy capability. Bear in mind, one does not simply turn this reverse proxy on; it will require extensive configuration to work with a production-ready Magento store.
• Use Percona over MySQL if Magento will be used in high traffic installations. Percona provides better all-around performance with Magento along with consistent write performance.
• Use Varnish as a reverse proxy server in front of your HTTP server. Utilize the Nexcess Turpentine plug-in for better compatibility between Varnish and Magento. In this configuration, a transaction per second increase of 1,300% beyond the 47 million transactions per day cited, along with a 15% improvement in orders per second can be realized.
• Utilize a two-level cache with memcached as the fast cache and Redis as the slow cache. Be sure available memory in each of these caches is high enough to prevent forced evictions. Evictions can be checked by observing the built-in stats for each cache instance. If using the two-level cache, be sure to apply the two-level cache bug fix.