The document discusses optimizing Magento hosting to increase online sales. It describes a case study of a travel website that experienced a catastrophic event due to a locked database from high query volumes. The root cause was identified and a solution was implemented using a "McManus Magic Shield" to block cache rebuilds if one was already in progress. Load testing results showed that code quality and site configuration are major factors in Magento performance. Best practices for development like reducing requests and using caching can significantly improve scalability. Faster page loading directly correlates to increased conversion rates.

2. The Devil is in the Details
How to Optimize Magento Hosting
to Increase Online Sales

3. Introduction
Will Bernstein
Executive Vice President,
Sales and Marketing

4. Outline
1. Case study: Zarpo.com solution engineering
2. Load testing results: lab vs. real-world testing
3. Best practices for Magento-optimized development
4. The link between performance and conversion

5. Case Study: Mystery of the Locked DB
• Zarpo.com is the first and largest flash sale travel
website in Latin America
• Based in
o Paulo Brazil
• Zarpo’s objective is to provide the best online user
experience to demanding Latin American travelers
• Running a highly customized deployment of Magento
Enterprise Edition

6. Case Study: Mystery of the Locked DB
Monday, January 13, 2014 – Catastrophic Event
• 12:37 PM: Critical ticket opened with ZeroLag Support –
“Zarpo is badly down”
• 12:48 PM: Initial trouble analysis complete – MySQL crash
– Extremely high volume of queries locked up the DB
• 1:04 PM: ZeroLag engineer kills queries and restarts SQL –
site back online
• 1:22 PM: Queries continue to pound SQL for reasons
unknown. ZeroLag staff keeps SQL online

7. Case Study: Mystery of the Locked DB
Monday, January 13, 2014
• 4:27 PM: Root cause deep dive begins
– Team is assembled: DBA and senior Magento / Linux engineers

8. Case Study: Mystery of the Locked DB
Monday, January 13, 2014
• 5:00 PM: DB diagnostics and configuration analysis begins
• 6:18 PM: Test environment is set up to focus on DB cache
under load

9. Case Study: Mystery of the Locked DB
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
• 8:15 AM: Root cause identified
– An AJAX call checks a custom cache
– When a travel deal gets sold or updated the cache is cleared
and the next AJAX call kicks off a recache
– If a cache has not been built by the time next AJAX call
happens, another cache rebuild gets launched
– Zarpo had recently released its mobile application and usage
increased 800% causing a massive log jam of cache rebuilds

10. Case Study: Mystery of the Locked DB
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
• 9:18 AM: Solution engineering begins

11. Case Study: Mystery of the Locked DB
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
• Developer briefing: ZeroLag recommends solution
– Add Ajax code that blocks all rebuilds if a rebuild is already in progress
• The Ajax call puts up a “loading new deals” clock for users during cache rebuilds
• As an added benefit, the clock contributes to the user experience by helping build
customer anticipation for deals, consistent with the flash sale business model

12. Case Study: Mystery of the Locked DB
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Zarpo names the successful solution “The McManus Magic Shield”

13. Case Study: Mystery of the Locked DB
Skype Room Chat Report from Zarpo
[1/24/14, 9:41:45 AM] Alexis Manach: excellent
news
[1/24/14, 9:41:56 AM] Alexis Manach: the
McManus magic shield is on..
[1/24/14, 9:42:09 AM] Alexis Manach: and
working beautifully..
[1/24/14, 9:42:43 AM] Alexis Manach: this
morning i triggered this big event recache with
over 550 concurrent users online and site did
not even move a little bit.

14. About ZeroLag
Get the power of 1:1
• Magento Platinum Hosting Partner
• Founded April 1999
• Founder, CEO Greg Strelzoff
• 80 Employees
• We never throw developers
under the bus!

15. Cameron King
02 Load Testing Results
Linux Manager

16. Purpose
• To observe Magento performance under varying store
sizes, cache configurations, and traffic levels
– Directly relates to questions we get asked on a weekly basis
during the pre-sale process

17. Lab and store test setup
• Environment: single load test server
– Tool: Gatling
– Method: Blind test (unbiased)
– Tiers: Single web & DB, Dual web & DB
– Code: stock Magento EE 1.13, no plugins
• Test grid:
– Cache: Memcached, Redis
– Store sizes: 1K, 100K, 500K products
– Traffic: 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 concurrent browsers
• Success rate: 99% to consider valid test

18. Environment Response Time vs. Traffic
www
db
www
db
www

19. Environment Response Time vs. Traffic
At 100 concurrent browsers, the “smaller” environment
performed best…
It depends on where the bottlenecks are!
• At low levels, CPU is not strained
• No benefit of extra CPU power from
two web servers
• 50ms overhead due to shared PHP
sessions (Memcached) and file
system (NFS)

20. Cache Response Time vs. Traffic
Redis Memcached

21. Lab Load Test Recap
• Environment sizing is important to performance
• Stock Magento is fast and scalable when deployed with
best practices
• Memcached and Redis have similar performance
profiles when under load
• This establishes a baseline on which we can compare
some real-world sites

22. Real-World Testing
• Selected 5 representative Magento sites
• Tested during off-peak hours
• Abort testing at >1% failure rate
• Generate Gatling install script for each site
• Same testing procedure as Lab tests

23. Client Response Time vs. Traffic

24. Client Response Time vs. Traffic
• Performs worse than the baseline
• Enabled Enterprise Edition Full Page
Cache, but not fully utilized
• Replaced stock Magento frontend with
Expression Engine
www www
db

25. Client Response Time vs. Traffic
• Performs better than the baseline
• Enabled a number of custom plugins
• Using Varnish and third-party plugin
www

26. Client Response Time vs. Traffic
• Performs better than the baseline
• Front-end designed for Magento
• Using Enterprise Edition FPC
• Using local HTTP Accelerator
www www
www
db

27. Client Response Time vs. Traffic
• Best scalability of all tested sites
• Most consistent performance
• Front-end designed for Magento
• Using Enterprise Edition FPC
• Using cloud-based HTTP accelerator
www www
db

28. Client Response Time vs. Traffic

29. Client Response Time vs. Traffic
www
db
• Great single-user experience
• Very poor scalability
• A large number of complex plugins
• Significant development issues
• Multiple developers working on the site
• File-based Magento fast cache
• DB-based PHP sessions
• FPC incompatible with plugins/code
• CPU intensive site

30. Real-World Load Test Recap
• Code quality is the single greatest factor in determining
performance of a Magento site
– Frontend
– Plugins
– Custom Code
• FPC, HTTP accelerators, clustering, and in-memory
fast cache are excellent ways to improve scalability

31. Best Practices in
Magento Development
03
Doug Goldberg
Vice President,
Magento Solutions

32. Common Bottlenecks
Poorly Optimized Frontend
– Making performance-impacting changes
– Very large images
– Hundreds of very small images
– Uncombined JavaScript/CSS
– JavaScript/CSS out of order
– No browser caching
– Performance-intensive uncached page elements

33. Best Practices
• Reduce the number of HTTP requests, limit external requests
– Base install of Magento has < 40 calls
– Most Magento sites I have seen: 100+ calls
• Compress files
– JavaScript, images, HTML, CSS, etc.
– Images should not be over 50KB
• Minify JS
– Removes unnecessary spaces, tabs, and other
selected characters
– Reduces overall size of the file
• Combine or merge JS and CSS

34. Best Practices, cont.
• Load CSS first, JavaScript last
– Page appears to be loaded on the user’s machine while JavaScript is catching
up and loading in the background
• Add expiration headers for static graphic files (Browser cache)
– 80% of page load time is downloading scripts, images, and CSS, which
normally don’t change very often
• Use CSS sprites
– Can cut page load time by reducing the amount of HTTP requests your page
makes to the server, through the consolidation of your CSS background
images

35. Best Practices, cont.
• Avoid redirects
– Site loads a header with a blank page, then loads
new page
– Increases the time it takes to get the user to the
page they actually want
• Use cache very aggressively
– Including Magento FPC if on Enterprise Edition
• Use CDN
– And even multiple zones for parallel downloads

36. 04 A Glimpse into the Future

37. HipHop Virtual Machine
• HipHop for PHP: a series of execution engines
and improvements created by Facebook
– Original motivation: save server resources
given large PHP codebase of facebook.com
– As development progressed: realization that
HipHop could substantially increase the speed
of PHP applications in general
• Current version open-sourced in late 2011
– Known as HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)

38. Case Study – Magento and HHVM
• Car Part Kings
• Wanted to run HHVM and fpm on the
same production site to compare
performance
• How do you do that?
– Query parameter strings (?h=1)

39. What does that look like?
• fpm
– carpartkings.com/mann-cabin-air-filter-cu-2949-2.html
• HHVM
– carpartkings.com/mann-cabin-air-filter-cu-2949-2.html?h=1

40. How did it perform?
• fpm page load time = 2.16 seconds
• HHVM page load time = 1.14 seconds
• On the first day, conversion increased by
500% over the similar fpm pages
• Facebook has seen increases in web
page generation throughput by factors of
up to 6x vs. Zend PHP

41. Is HHVM ready for primetime?
• Not quite yet
– Car Part Kings, ZeroLag and the HHVM consultant got it working
– But it needed to be restarted 4 to 5 times a day
• Currently deactivated
– HHVM consultant working on a solution to eliminate crashes

42. The Link Between
Performance and Conversion
05
Aaron Koch
Vice President,
Direct Sales

43. How performance impacts your business
Why is performance critical?
Studies show users are more likely to convert on a faster site
− Slow sites subconsciously erode user confidence
− User Experience is everything and there are two components:
• Visible user experience - look and feel of the site along with
information architecture
• Invisible user experience - the passage of time itself
• Front-end innovation combined with back-end performance
optimization delivers the best User Experience possible

44. How performance impacts your business
Magento performance can set your revenue on fire…

45. How performance impacts your business
But slowing down suddenly can cost you dearly!

46. How performance impacts your business
• Consciously or not, visitors expect pages to load in two
seconds or less
• A one-second delay reduces conversions by 7%*
• Even seemingly tolerable delays can add up to substantial
lost revenue
– For example, a site which sells $100,000 per day can lose as much as
$2.5 million annually for every extra second of page load delay*
• Small changes in site speed can have a huge impact on
e-commerce sales
*According to research conducted by Akamai and Gomez Advisors (now Compuware)

47. Relationship of load time and bounce rate
Lost Opportunity

48. Evaluating your site
Use free tools to analyze your Magento sites
• Knowing is half the battle
WebPagetest (webpagetest.org)
• TTFB, image compression,
caching, CDN
• Compare web sites’ page load
times

49. Evaluating your site
Use free tools to analyze your Magento sites
• Knowing is half the battle
Gtmetrix (gtmetrix.com)
• Breakdown 25+ page speed
components
• Provides performance
improvement recommendations
• Also, Magento-specific
recommendations

50. Evaluating your site
Use free tools to analyze your Magento sites
• Knowing is half the battle
YSlow (yslow.org)
• Waterfall chart shows each call
to build the page, with
associated load time
• Open Source; also available as
browser plugin for Chrome,
Firefox, more

51. Leave this room with a plan
• Choose a hosting company that you think will best
support your business
• Implement a multi-layered strategy for
optimization and caching
• Communicate with your hosting company
and your solution partner; work together
to improve performance
• Remember that your website is a tool, not a canvas

52. Thank you!
ZeroLag.com | 877-ZERO-LAG