Magento Q&A - Recent questions and answers

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Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:50:03 +0000

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Tue, 13 Mar 2012 07:55:24 +0000

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Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:32:15 +0000

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Answered: Php apc installation

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 06:51:54 +0000

Sono semplicemente ptactiei i commenti del conduttore sulla stravaganza estetica del giudice Mesiano.Il giudice, al di fuori del tribunale, e8 libero di fumare quanto vuole, di vestirsi come vuole, di passeggiare come e dove vuole e, soprattutto, di brindare a quello che vuole.Il resto sono chiacchiere da salotto (comprese le chiacchiere del giornalista in collegamento) tipiche di trasmissioni come Mattino5.Dovrebbe invece vergognarsi il conduttore che, da giornalista e scrittore quale dovrebbe essere, si ritrova a presentare un programma basato sul niente.This comment was originally posted on

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Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:55:54 +0000

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Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:00:32 +0000

Mr. Karnazes, I work and teach at the USACHCS (United States Army Chaplain Center School). We are starting The Soul Warrior Challenge this group will be part of the Tri-God Adventure Series. It is a saptiruil and physical fitness group. The goal is for each person to run the race that is set before them We will train together for a series of short races culminating in the Columbia Half-Marathon on 26 Feb 2011. In additions to physical challenges, we will also have saptiruil challenges.Mr. Karnazes, we would like you to speak and run with our group sometime in the following months leading up to the Columbia Half-Marathon on 26 Feb 2011. (early Feb would be awesome!) I have ran in college and do triathlons. I have deployed three times in the last seven years and I will begin running ultras (The JFK will be my first). I have read your books and you are an amazing motivator. I know you have given hope to thousands of people. Would you be willing to speak/help our group? We should be able to cover all fees for travel and speaking. Thank you and peace!

uIhHuYZwiouQI

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 02:39:14 +0000

Hey Dean! I’m 24 and a Recreation Parks and Tourism major at Cal Poly SLO with a concentration in Outdoor Adventure. This isn’t a oeustiqn but I couldn’t find anywhere else to send you my thanks. Just over a year and a half ago I was 280lbs, struggling with waves of depression and needed something to change my life. My cousin had told me about your book and it inspired me to train for a little sprint triathlon in SLO. The feeling of completing the race was awesome because I felt better and knew that I was on the path to really making a difference in myself. I’d never run more than 4 miles at one time before and trained to run a local half marathon and was awed with myself for finishing. Then I did the Santa Barbra Long Course Tri that was a 1mi swim, 34mi bike and a 10 run. It took me just under 4 hours without stopping and was the hardest thing at the time I’d ever done. I’ve set a goal to complete an iron man within my lifetime and wanted to just say thanks for your humble and encouraging support to make a difference. I’m now 210 and yesterday I completed my first marathon in San Diego. Buy far the hardest test of physical endurance I’ve ever challenged myself to. I made it in 5hrs and 9mins without walking and felt as if my legs were going to give out. I hope to run with you someday but until then keep up the good work.Jayson

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Sat, 10 Mar 2012 20:17:33 +0000

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Answered: Magento url or paths

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:27:33 +0000

One tip that a few of our customers have fllaen foul of:your paypal email address as registered with paypal and your paypal email address as entered into the Magento backend are case sensitive.So you if you register with paypal as you must enter the exact same info into the magento backend.Drove me slightly mad the 1st time I came across this.

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Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:24:14 +0000

alright well i’ve seen like 3 of your blogs and i think you have way too much time on your hands. i think you hlousd get out more your hott as hell instead of making another blog go out party it up drink a s**t ton of alcohol do something perductive have some funn bro. in addition I’m not trying to sit here and judge you or degrade or anything like that so please don’t get offended. BUT i do have a question for you i have like 5 actually.first one is do you believe in karma or reincarnation?what’s your favorite food?do you believe in god?would you rather have oreo mouth for the rest of your life or chetto fingers?just curious who was the first guy you kissed and was it awkward??hahahah, from the blogs i’ve seen most of the people ask if you and dave have hit it off i have a little comment on that. we all know you guy’s have done s**t and I’m sure you get annoyed when everybody asks you that so come on everybody use your common sense. hahah, well bye dude!

Answered: multiple web nodes

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 15:21:43 +0000

There is a critical shortage of infomrtaive articles like this.

Answered: Eliminate scans ht

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 08:59:08 +0000

At last, seomone comes up with the "right" answer!

Answered: Apache mod_cache

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 08:24:41 +0000

David, W3TC has more capabilities, so when vurioas events the plugin performs run more memory is required. It has nothing to do with how the plugin works, it's just life. WordPress itself requires different amounts of memory depending on what you're doing also. We're talking here about PHP's memory allocation, none of the cases you're referring to. Since every theme, server etc is different I don't have any rules of thumb here, but in the past year I've only seen 1 user that had to change their PHP memory allocation and that was because of how their theme was written.

Answered: Security Tip: Changing the Admin URL

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 07:55:45 +0000

Hey Rev. Voodoo.Regrettably I changed both my WordPress URL and my Site Address URL in my Admin/Settings to ftberbooih.com.Now, although the site can be accessed I have lost all the formatting and more importantly I can't get into the admin panel.Before I do any more damage I was hoping for some help .any would be appreciated!I own ftberbooih.com which I redirect to this directory where I have installed WP.The reason I was mucking about in the first place was I was getting some good traffic but it was referencing the sub directory and I wanted it to be showing ftberbooih.com in the search results.No expectation but I could use some advice, thanks in advance for any.

Answered: Query Cach mysql

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 07:09:03 +0000

I literally jumped out of my chair and dacend after reading this!

Answered: Host your site in the country where your customers are.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 02:27:39 +0000

Articles like this really grease the shafts of konwlgede.

Answered: Use a PHP accelerator like APC, ZendOptimizer+ or Xcache.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:54:19 +0000

You got to push it-this esestnial info that is!

Answered: innodb_thread_concurrency.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:27:26 +0000

For the love of God, keep writing these airtcles.

Answered: Apache KeepAlive

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:51:57 +0000

So, is this the order in which they are hit?Client browserNginxVarnishApacheSo a user bmiusts a request on port 80 to Nginx, which reverse proxies Varnish cache, and for non cached items (PHP etc) Varnish cache reverse proxies to Apache which then sends the content through Varnish to Nginx to the user?Have I got this right? Also, would something like APC work in this setup or would that defeat the whole object of not caching if the user has a session/ cookie?

Answered: Enable Gzip Compression in htaccess.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:04:53 +0000

I need to make my magento site fatser. There fore I applied your setting in htaccess but # enable resulting html compressionphp_flag zlib.output_compression onparticular code giving 500 error. Once removing the code the site runs but not fatser.How can I add this compression code and if I need to set anything in server, then how can I do that one. Please guide as your help will be entirely grateful for me.

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Fri, 09 Mar 2012 23:46:23 +0000

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Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:00:27 +0000

Thanks for sharing. Your post is a usfeul contribution.

Answered: Only install necessary Apache modules.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:05:10 +0000

And to think I was going to talk to somnoee in person about this.

Answered: Don’t host files on your web server that you do not use, large or small.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:43:41 +0000

Yeah that's what I'm talknig about baby--nice work!

Answered: Goto MySQL Admin and select all the tables and repair and then optimize them.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:57:09 +0000

If time is money you've made me a welahtier woman.

Answered: Use a memory-based filesystem for dynamic data.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:40:12 +0000

As far as I know eaccelerator has no limit on the aoumnt of files it stores on the file cache portion. There is only a limitation on the shared memory portion. There are some tricks to handling this better like putting eaccelerator files in /dev/shm then wiping it out every hour via cron say. This would provide a much larger performance increase compared to the file cache and it will also be limited in space.

Answered: Fool Proof Magento Upgrades 1.3>1.4

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 10:15:19 +0000

Like you I was pleased to see the 1.4.1.0 rlesaee as it fixes may of the niggly problems particularly the PayPal updates. The move from EAV to Flat Tables is interesting but not unique. Previous versions had flat tables for certain tables. It should certainly help with the performance side of things. I hope Magento doesn't move away from the EAV Model, despite the performance implications. EAV is one of Magento's key strengths and one of the reasons it's such an extendable platform to work on.

Answered: Recommended innodb_buffer_pool_size.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:54:20 +0000

Some good tips here, but when you mention to watch your ewbrsor to see about external calls, you really need to be using Firefox with the add-on Firebug. This will give you a wealth of info on your site, and what's taking time to load. Your point about optimizing images is key, there are plenty of online sites that will do it for you for free (something nice if you're at work and don't have access to PS or The Gimp). You mention tuning your DB, but how about ensuring that the new database is created as InnDB? That'll help, and I think is default for anything +5.2.x. Also, while most won't have access, you can really improve things in MySQL by modifying the my.cnf conf file on your server. Upping memory usage and enabling caching are key here.Other ideas that I use, but are only applicable if you have your own server or access:webserver instead of Apache, use Lighttpd, it's faster and lighter'. if you're extra l33t, try out nginx!php ensure you have some kind of php accelerator I've used eAccelerator (a fork of the old MMTurke Cache) for years, but I've recently been using Xcache (created by a developer of Lighttpd) and have been happy with it so far.reverse-proxy a big one if you get a lot of traffic, but still helpful if you don't. Squid has always been the choice, but again, I've gone with a newer app, Varnish. I've done tests in production areas at my work, and believe the hype, Varnish will stand up and really help, esp if you ever get a Digg'ing. It is fast, and old Squid just dosen't compare.Lastly, within WordPress add WP Cache, or the newer/updated fork, WP Super Cache it speeds things up nicely. Yes, you can have all of these layers of caching (reverse proxy, php opticode, wp-cache) working together.So these are just some of my geekier suggestions, it's funny, I've run my server online from home since 2001, but it's only been the last 3 months I've looked at monetizing sites; it's good fun, and sites like yours give a good start to a n00b' like me!Hope my tips help, gimme a shout if you have any questions. I'm hoping to be able to contribute to the whole online marketing world soon much as you are now.Thanks.fak3r's last blog post..

Answered: Reduce Magento resources using meta tag robots

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:21:58 +0000

cusious are you on the same server as the live sites? and using the live db? and once you get the sign off on uderapgs do you copy files over to the live site or go through the process of magento connect again?

Database Session Storage

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:39:38 +0000

Database Session Storage

Typically, database servers are less utilised than web servers. Performance can usually be improved by moving session handling from the web server filesystem into the database server. Magento asks you whether you prefer a file or database session save type, but this is very easy to change in the XML. Open up /var/www/app/etc/local.xml, locate the <session_save> tags, and change the value so it looks like this (the default is <![CDATA[files]]>):

<session_save><![CDATA[db]]></session_save>

Another alternative is to use memcache for storing the sessions - this isn’t as persistent as the database store, but may be faster:

<session_save><![CDATA[memcache]]></session_save>

<session_save_path><![CDATA[tcp://127.0.0.1:11211?persistent=1&weight;=2&timeout;=10&retry;_interval=10]]></session_save_path>

Apache mod_expires

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:35:13 +0000

Well-written browser software will keep a cache of the webpages a user visits. Each webpage should have a content expiry header directive that tells the browser when the cache expires. If this header is not correctly set then the browser will re-request the content from source with every page hit. In order to ensure that the Magento pages have the correct content expiry in the header, you can add the following block to Magento's .htaccess file:

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
</ifmodule>

memcached installation

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:32:03 +0000

Memcached

Memcached is a distributed memory caching system that stores data retrieved from the database (or other data source) in memory, allowing repeat reads to retrieve the data from memory rather than needing to query the database again, greatly increasing the speed of web applications.

The first thing to do is install the memcache daemon and client libraries:

root# apt-get update
root# apt-get install memcached php5-memcache

To check if memcache is running, you can use the following command:

root# ps -ef | grep memcached

You should ensure that the localhost has been added to the configuration, this can be done using grep as shown here:

Nginx for Magento- conf file

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:25:41 +0000

contents of /etc/nginx.conf

user admin apache;
worker_processes 4;

#error_log logs/error.log;
#error_log logs/error.log notice;
#error_log logs/error.log info;

#pid logs/nginx.pid;

events {
worker_connections 1024;
}

# main server config

http {

include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;

log_format main ‘$remote_addr – $remote_user [$time_local] $request ‘
‘”$status” $body_bytes_sent “$http_referer” ‘
‘”$http_user_agent” “$http_x_forwarded_for”‘;

#sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
gzip on;
gzip_static on;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_min_length 512;
gzip_buffers 256 8k;
gzip_comp_level 2;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml;
server_tokens off;

client_header_timeout 10m;
client_body_timeout 10m;
send_timeout 3m;

client_header_buffer_size 1k;
large_client_header_buffers 4 4k;

output_buffers 1 32k;
postpone_output 1460;

keepalive_timeout 60 15;

# virtual hosting
include conf.d/*.conf;
}

and this would be our Vhost file (under conf.d/)

server {

listen 80;
server_name yourDomain.com;

root /home/wwwdir;

location ~* \.(ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)(\?[0-9]+)?$ {
expires max;
break;
}

location / {
index index.html index.php; ## Allow a static html file to be shown first
try_files $uri $uri/ @handler; ## If missing pass the URI to Magento’s front handler
expires 30d; ## Assume all files are cachable
}
location /minify/ { ## Needed for Fooman Speedster
rewrite ^/minify/([0-9]+)(/.*\.(js|css))$ /lib/minify/m.php?f=$2&d=$1 last;
}

## These locations would be hidden by .htaccess normally
location /app/                { deny all; }
location /includes/           { deny all; }
location /lib/                { deny all; }
location /lib/minify/         { allow all; } ##
location /media/downloadable/ { deny all; }
location /pkginfo/            { deny all; }
location /report/config.xml   { deny all; }
location /var/                { deny all; }

location /var/export/ { ## Allow admins only to view export folder
auth_basic “Restricted”; ## Message shown in login window
auth_basic_user_file htpasswd; ## See /etc/nginx/htpassword
autoindex on;
}

location /. { ## Disable .htaccess and other hidden files
return 404;
}

location @handler { ## Magento uses a common front handler
rewrite / /index.php;
}

location ~ \.php/ { ## Forward paths like /js/index.php/x.js to relevant handler
rewrite ^(.*\.php)/ $1 last;
}

location ~ .php$ { ## Execute PHP scripts

if (!-e $request_filename) { rewrite / /index.php last; } ## Catch 404s that try_files miss

#expires        off; ## Do not cache dynamic content
fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_param HTTPS $fastcgi_https;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param MAGE_RUN_CODE default;
fastcgi_param MAGE_RUN_TYPE store;
include        fastcgi_params; ## See /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params

}
}

Use sa seperate backend

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:37:37 +0000

Use seperate backend server to handle admin users, process backend activity (cron), pre generate full page caching and to handle media queries.

Should I use the Magento Compiler?

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:19:42 +0000

A lot of mysterious fog surrounds the Magento Compiler, a feature that was introduced in Magento version 1.4.2. According to the original announcement, it realizes 25-50% performance gain. But later Yoav Kutner (Magento chief) said:

In later versions since we optimized the catalog EAV, Magento Compilation is not really needed if you have byte code caching and if it is configured correctly

So is it still useful or not? What does he mean with “configured correctly”? Only one way to find out: descend into the crypts of Magento internals.

Background

First of all, “code compilation” does not refer to converting PHP code into executable machine code. It merely concatenates various PHP files into larger files and stores them in a single location (“includes/src”). Why would anyone want to do that? Because it increases the efficiency of the Autoloader. Normally, upon a request to load a class, the Autoloader looks in four locations to find the appropriate PHP file: app/code/local, app/code/community, app/code/core and finally lib. Useful if you want to overload certain core code with your own version, but slow because of the huge amount of classes scattered around the filesystem.

So the Compiler ensures that the Autoloader only has to look in includes/src and will open less files. A good thing! But how good? Amaze yourself with the following figures.

Setup

I defined four testcases, namely with and without APC, with and without the compiler enabled. The target shop is the sample shop running Magento 1.5.1. All types of block caching are enabled. If APC was enabled, this was used as blockcache store, otherwise the file backend was used. I used strace to measure the number of open() system calls and the amount of time spent on disk i/o per pageview. The server uses NFS storage and is otherwise idle. In each testcase I did 5 requests to make sure various caches were primed and subsequently did 30 requests (no concurrency) to measure the average time and number of system calls.

Results


.	Disk i/o in ms	-APC -Compile	-APC +Compile	+APC -Compile	+APC +Compile
.	Frontpage	153	57	34	11
.	Productpage	310	146	58	26
.
.	num of open()	-APC -Compile	-APC +Compile	+APC -Compile	+APC +Compile
.	Frontpage	263	103	11	13
.	Productpage	465	284	23	25
.
.	num of stat64()	-APC -Compile	-APC +Compile	+APC -Compile	+APC +Compile
.	Frontpage	1469	377	694	86
.	Productpage	2479	1044	1114	226

Discussion

After the results poured in, I was puzzled by the APC-enabled figures. How could Magento spend less time on disk i/o while it opened more files? The difference is apparently in the number of stat64() calls that are greatly reduced by using the compiler mode.

The average speed benefit in using the compiler mode without APC is 100-150 ms.

The average speed benefit in using the compiler mode with APC is 25-30 ms.

So based on average figures, one could confirm Yoav’s statement that the benefit of the compiler with APC is neglectible.

However, one should note that this system was otherwise completely idle and most likely all the filesystem calls were completely cached in local RAM. Previous measurements on normally loaded systems (iowait < 1%) show that when the local filesystem cache is saturated, the speed of stat64() calls can vary greatly, with real world figures of up to 300ms per call. That means that eliminating stat64() calls will reduce i/o performance fluctuation on NFS or other non-dedicated storage. In more human terms: enabling the compiler will eliminate this odd “slow page”.

So the answer is: Yes, use the Magento compiler!

Change realpath_cache_size in php.ini.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:33:29 +0000

Change realpath_cache_size in php.ini.

realpath_cache_size=1M (careful, this is per apache process) realpath_cache_ttl=86400 (ok for production site)

Use a memory-based filesystem

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:31:34 +0000

Use a memory-based filesystem for dynamic data. If you store dynamic data (var/cache, var/session) on RAMdisk or tmpfs, the disk I/O is decreased.

set php_value memory_limit

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:30:54 +0000

set ‘php_value memory_limit 128M’ in your php configuration or add it to your .htaccess file to ensure you don’t run out of memory.

Query Cach size

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:29:15 +0000

Query Cach size: Magento Blog: Modify the configuration for your MySQL server to take better advantage of your server’s RAM. Most Linux distributions provide a conservative MySQL package out of the box to ensure it will run on a wide array of hardware configurations. If you have ample RAM (eg, 1gb or more), then you may want to try tweaking the configuration. An example my.cnf is below, though you will want to consult the MySQL documentation for a complete list of configuration directives and recommended settings.

Upgrade to the latest Magento version.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:28:21 +0000

Always upgrade to the latest Magento version. Not only will you get more features and bug- and security fixes, but with every update Magento performs better.

Compile MySQL

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:27:34 +0000

Compile MySQL from source instead of your OS’s package manager.

Turn off or at least reduce web server logging

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:26:42 +0000

Turn off or at least reduce web server logging (reduces disk writes).

Disable Access Time Logging. Magento Wiki: For Linux servers, if you have access-time logging enabled on any of your mysql, web server or cache partitions, try turning it off for a performance boost. If you’re using ext3 or reiserfs there may be faster journal write methods you can use. For more info see Linux.com.

Make your output W3C compliant.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:24:59 +0000

Make your output W3C compliant. Errors slow down the browser.

Enable Apache KeepAlives

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:23:43 +0000

Make sure your Apache configuration has KeepAlives enabled. KeepAlives are a trick where multiple HTTP requests can be funneled through a single TCP connection. The setup of each TCP connection incurs additional time, this can significantly reduce the time it takes to download all the files (HTML, JavaScript, images) for a website. More info at Apache.org.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:18:17 +0000

for parallel transfer of static content. There is a Magento extension that can help you do this with category and product images: the One Pica Image CDN. But… (see next tip).

Compress output, use zlib.output_compression or mod_deflate.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:16:26 +0000

Use Apache mod_expires and be sure to set how long files should be cached.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:12:59 +0000

You could use the example below for your Apache virtualhost config:

# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
                ExpiresActive On
                ExpiresDefault A0

                # Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)

                        ExpiresDefault A29030400
                        Header append Cache-Control "public"

                # Set up caching on media files for 2 weeks

                        ExpiresDefault A1209600
                        Header append Cache-Control "public"

                # Set up 1 week caching on commonly updated files

                        ExpiresDefault A604800
                        Header append Cache-Control "proxy-revalidate"

                # Force no caching for dynamic files

                        ExpiresActive Off
                        Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
                        Header set Pragma "no-cache"

Get a dedicated server.

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:09:02 +0000