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I've recently launched a magento ce 1.8.1 store and noticed that slowdown in speed. So I checked on pingdom and noticed there's a long 'wait time' in loading an html/php page.

Hope someone can share some insights and provide some suggestions on this.

Does it have anything to do with the server? That file is only 25.9kB and it's seems to be the first thing/file the site attempts to connect and load when someone visits the site.

Any input would be appreciated. Thanks!

user6212
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  • Are the site caches turned on? If so have you checked the permissions of the var/cache folders . They need to be read/write and Exec for the user that your site runs as. – Dave Farthing Apr 17 '14 at 17:07
  • Waittime is the time between the request hits the webserver/php and the time of the first byte recieved. Aka the time rendering the page. – Fabian Blechschmidt May 30 '14 at 11:55
  • Magento isn't slow, it will deliver 0.6s TTFB with caches disabled. The only thing that makes Magento slow, is bad code and bad hosting. – choco-loo Oct 08 '14 at 21:11
  • What is the software in the picture? – Colliot Aug 25 '15 at 03:23

2 Answers2

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Magento & speed has always been quite the controversial topic. The belief that Magento is "slow" is - contrary to popular belief - not true. Previous versions of Magento have been scrutinized for the poor performance speed but their team have made a lot of performance improvements.

There are so, so many things that need to be considered in terms of your sites performance, ranging from:

  • Who your web host is,
  • How much experience they have,
  • What the hardware is like
  • What performance optimizations are in play
  • Which caching mechanism you are using
  • Whether you have enabled the Magento's native compiler

And the list can go on, and on, and on. What I would recommend is - and I cannot stress this enough - research, research, research.

  1. Make sure your web server is equipped to host Magento (9/10 times this would be the case as the requirements are not that intensive - you can even get away with shared hosting depending on the size of your website).

  2. Ensure that you have optimized your .htaccess file (this can make a huge difference)

  3. Read this article: Magento Whitepaper: Best Practices for Optimum Performance written by the team over at Nexcess.net (a Magento platinum hosting partner with years of experience ranging from shared & dedicated hosting all the way to enterprise based servers).

  4. Consult your friendly www.google.com page and explore. There are some interesting full page cache extensions available, you'll need to check them out and decide for yourself. Most of them come with a money-back period so you can test it and decide whether or not it is for you)

One thing you need to realize about Magento & performance, is that this is not simply a "once off" fix, this will be a life-long-learning experience filled with blood, sweat and tears (not to forget - laughter).

Enjoy the trip and take great satisfaction in every victory - be it big or small.

P.S. You can measure your performance using a wide array of different resources, here are just a few:

Moose
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I have a similar issue. I've just upgraded a 1.7.02 site to 1.8.1.0 and noticed an immediate degradation of speed - page load times up from < 1 second to 5+ seconds.

This site is running on a dedicated server, with .htaccess optimisations as recommended, using a cdn, etc. The server is not the issue, since 1.7 was blisteringly fast - all page types were routinely loading around 750 ms to 1 second.

However, as a test, I swapped out the template I was using for the default Magento template & the speed improvement was like, wow! Everything was as fast, if not faster than the 1.7 version. Restoring our original template resulted in page load times of 5+ seconds again.

So, I'm assuming there's something's not quite right with our template (eventho' the template designer released a 1.8 version), especially the product page, where load times are slowest. Needless to say, the template designer (who has been dodging responsibility to date) has been notified!

Therefore, my suggestion is to do as I did - see if running the default Magento template makes any noticeable difference. If so, then the template may be the origin of your problem.

freshwebs
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  • I highly suggest you make your issue a separate topic. The original poster launched as far as I can see a fresh site. You did an upgrade and identified the cause as in the templates. I can't think of anything in the upgrade path with respect to templates that would cause this (and that wouldn't be slow in 1.7.x), so it's a very interesting topic to identify. –  May 03 '14 at 08:35
  • Templates and third party modules always need to be scrutinized on every major .x upgrade for these and other anomalies. Upgrading isn't just a simple load and run operation as many have found to their great disgust when upgrading their live e-commerce site without running it through a test server first. – Fiasco Labs May 03 '14 at 16:24