Magento 1.4 was released some weeks ago, and despite of some minor bugs, we started using it right away. And we're glad to do this: The MagentoTM 1.4 application runs much smoother than the 1.3 version, both in the frontend as the backend.
Performance enhancements of 1.4
Caching has been improved, but many people were also waiting for the faster re-indexing options: For instance, refreshing the Layered Navigation index with larger Magento 1.3 sites was a nightmare and took much much too long. All this is fixed, and therefor daily administrative tasks run much smoother in Magento 1.4.
There are also some new performance features: The Magento Compiler module is not yet part of the core, but gives a great boost to Magento sites. It moves all the files needing to be included into one single path, so that less time is needed to find out which file needs to come from where. Another feature is the option to merge CSS files, decreasing the number of HTTP requests needed by the browser. It works fine, but gives problems when images or other CSS-files are indicated using relative (instead of absolute) paths.
More performance, more performance
Still, Magento could be speed up even more: With our YireoTM Magento tutorials you will find more and more information on how to increase performance using various tricks: Compression through gzip or mod_deflate, image compression, Apache mod_expire, ETags, CDNs - it all adds to the speed of Magento.
