MageBridge performance tricks
Friday, 11 February 2011Running a MageBridge site offers a lot of benefits: Building a Magento shop is made a lot easier, content management makes marketing really effective and MageBridge even gives some performance benefits: But Magento stays a heavy application and therefor performance is still a tricky thing.
Beware of MageBridge caching
A couple of versions ago, we introduced the feature of MageBridge caching and this was enabled quickly by several administrators in their shop: With weird results. MageBridge caching is a complex technology but gives a simple benefit: For every page, MageBridge needs to contact Magento for data. Multiple requests to Magento are bundled in one single HTTP-request, but if no requests are made at all, Magento never needs to be started up.
If all Magento requests could be cached on the Joomla! side, this would result in skipping the entire Magento application - lightning speed. Unfortunately, reality is much more difficult. Various Magento parts should never ever be cached (shopping cart, checkout, user-related items) and therefor, MageBridge caching is actually only a real option for the expert.
Dedicated hosting
Instead of spending many hours on MageBridge caching, a much better alternative is to spend time (and money) on optimizing the hosting environment. One basic switch to be made is from shared hosting (which is definitely a big no for Magento) and dedicated hosting. However, this is not all:
If you have a VPS with 1Gb RAM, it does not mean that this 1Gb RAM is actually used properly. MySQL configurations need to be optimized, PHP-settings modified, and if possible, Linux memory-tricks can be used to optimize Magento even more.
More information
For more information on how to tune MageBridge, check our MageBridge Performance Tuning guide.