The presentation discusses strategies to improve site performance for Magento, highlighting the importance of updating to PHP 5.4.28 for better speed, while warning about the lack of official support for PHP 5.5+. It also emphasizes the significance of using modern versions of MySQL, particularly XtraDB, and the need for high-quality SSDs and HDDs tailored to workload profiles. The talk, delivered by Chris Wells, includes performance test results comparing PHP and MySQL versions, illustrating various improvements achieved by upgrading and optimizing server configurations.

1. Simple Steps to Win the Site
Performance Battle
(and other hopefully interesting stuff)
CHRIS WELLS – CEO – NEXCESS.NET LLC
SOUTHFIELD, MI USA

2. Quick Facts About Detroit, MI
• It’s the potato chip capital of the world
• based on consumption 
• It had the 1st mile of concrete road (1909)
• Between 6 and 7 mile roads on M-1 (Woodward)
• Home to the only floating Post Office in the U.S.
• J.W.Westcott Co (Zip code: 48222)
• It has the most registered bowlers nationwide
• Biggest municipal bankruptcy in the U.S.
• Which makes us National Bankruptcy Champions!!
• Eat your heart out Jefferson County, AL!! We did 4 x better than you!!

3. Notes About This Talk
• Lessons learned from MagentoLive Australia
• If masses walk out mid-talk I’m being:
A)WAY too technical
B) Ridiculously boring
• Lessons learned from MagentoLive UK
• If I sweat profusely:
A) DO NOT BEALARMED
B) Assume the technical folks located at the back of the room simply swapped out
the real talk I had prepared with something they thought was more fun and I’m
simply dying a slow 35 minute death on stage before your very eyes.

4. The Basics NOT On Today’s Agenda
• OS level set up / configuration
• Apache or Nginx
• Magento caching
• Magento EE’s FPC
• Varnish /Turpentine or other reverse proxy caching techniques
• Other performance extensions
• At this point we’re all well aware…
• So let’s dig a little deeper into some fun stuff!

5. *ON* Today’s Agenda
• PHP – 92%
• MySQL – 3% (if time permits)
• Drives – 5% (if time permits)
• If you leave here today with some food for thought then I’m happy!

6. PHP – Personal Home Page
• Yes, I know.. It’s now “PHP: Hypertext preprocessor”
• Magento used to be version locked to PHP <= 5.3
• As of January Magento officially supports PHP 5.4! Woohoo!
• You may need to patch your Magento for it to work with 5.4
• So…?
• PHP 5.4 is a good deal faster than 5.3
• Empty hash table optimizations
• Literal tables
• Interned strings
• Zend EngineVM tuning
• But what does this mean for Magento?

7. Notes On Magento
• Magento is very CPU heavy
• The bulk of this heaviness is within PHP code
• MySQL CPU usage is typically bound by PHP’s CPU usage (speaking in single
server terms)
• Magento is not very I/O heavy (contrary to popular belief)
• Again, I/O is bound by PHP’s CPU usage
• More on I/O later
• Quantitative notes to follow 

8. Let’s Test Us Some PHP
• 1-hour Siege runs (meant to tax PHP, not MySQL)
• EE tests
• Siege of 20,000 SKUs hitting ~20,000 random URLs
• FPC enabled (Redis)
• CE tests
• Siege of 120 SKUs hitting ~120 URLs.
• Bare metal configuration of:
• Dell R420 – Dual E5-2420 6-core
• H710 512MB NV + 4 x 15K 300GB RAID 10
• 24G RAM
• Ok ok, let’s see what we’ve got!

9. PHP 5.3.24 (CE Front-end Baseline)
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Siegetransacons/second
Dura on (in minutes)
PHP 5.3.24
~42 t/sec

10. PHP 5.3.24 vs. PHP 5.4.28 (CE Front-end)
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Siegetransacons/second
Dura on (in minutes)
PHP 5.3.24
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Siegetransacons/second
Dura on (in minutes)
PHP 5.3.24
PHP 5.4.28
~52 t/sec
(~23% increase!)
Magento cache
population

11. PHP 5.3.24 (EE Front-end Baseline)
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Siegetransacons/second
Dura on (in minutes)
PHP 5.3.24
~550 t/sec
GO GO FPC!

12. PHP 5.3.24 vs. PHP 5.4.28 (EE Front-end)
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Siegetransacons/second
Dura on (in minutes)
PHP 5.3.24
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Siegetransacons/second
Dura on (in minutes)
PHP 5.3.24
PHP 5.4.28
~615 t/sec
(~12% increase!!)FPC / Magento cache
population amplifies
base PHP version
improvements

13. PHP 5.3.24 vs. PHP 5.4.28/.14 (EE Front-end)
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Siegetransacons/second
Dura on (in minutes)
PHP 5.3.24
PHP 5.4.14
PHP 5.4.28
Even upgrading from
5.4.14 shows gains of ~4%

14. PHP 5.3.24 vs. PHP 5.4.28 (Re-index from CLI)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
PHP 5.3.24
PHP 5.3.24
Time In Seconds
86
88
90
92
94
96
98
100
PHP 5.3.24
PHP 5.4.28
~8% improvement

15. Let’s Push Things a Little Further...

16. PHP 5.4.28 vs. PHP 5.5.12 (EE/Front-end)
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Siegetransacons/second
Dura on (in minutes)
PHP 5.4.28
PHP 5.5.12
~781 t/sec
~25% better than 5.4
~41% better than 5.3
WOW 
FPC / Magento cache
population again
amplifies base PHP
version improvements

17. Notes On PHP 5.5.x+
• !! Warning – Magento does not yet officially support 5.5+ !!
• APC goes out
• Magento configs may need to be tweaked if you’re using APC’s key/val caching
• Some extensions will need to be updated / re-coded for sure
• OPcache is introduced
• OPcache is the name of the bundled ZendOptimizer+ opcode caching system
• Seems to work out of the box without too much fuss
• More research is needed here – was very surprised with the performance results
• !! Warning – Magento does not yet officially support 5.5+ !!

18. PHP 5.4.28 vs. PHP 5.5.12 (Re-index from CLI)
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
PHP 5.4.28
PHP 5.5.12
Time In Seconds
~4% improvement

19. Let’s Push Things a Little Further…

20. PHP 5.5.12 vs. PHP 5.6.0-BETA2 (EE/Front-end)
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Siegetransacons/second
Dura on (in minutes)
PHP 5.5.12
PHP 5.6.0 (BETA 2)
Essentially equal within
margin of error

21. PHP 5.5.12 vs. PHP 5.6.0-BETA2 (Re-index from CLI)
72
74
76
78
80
82
84
86
88
PHP 5.5.12
PHP 5.6.0 BETA2
Time In Seconds
BUT, we got ~11%
improvement on the re-index!
~21.5% better than 5.3.24!

22. Let’s…

23. PHP 5.5.12 vs. PHP-NG (EE/Front-end)

24. Notes on PHP-NG
• Removes numerous heap allocations (and de-allocations)
• Stores more native data directly on the stack
• Removes the need to garbage collect basic primitives (bool, long, etc)
• PHP’s reportedWordpress benchmarks show very good results
• 26.75 sec -> 18.95 sec (36% improvement)
• 9.5M instructions -> 5M internal instructions executed (90% reduction)
• Take some comfort in knowing that more gains are on the way from
PHP folks directly

25. Simple Step #1 – Use PHP 5.4.28 (for now)
**But watch out for future PHP releases!

26. MySQL – “My SQL”
• My is the Michael Widinius’s daughter’s name (this was news to me)
• Lots of “brand” options on the MySQL front unlike PHP
• MariaDB
• Percona Server / PerconaCluster
• Oracle’s MySQL
• Equally many options on the storage engine front
• MyISAM
• InnoDB
• XtraDB

27. Let’s Test Us Some MySQL
• ~1 hour re-index runs (ideally meant to put some load on MySQL)
• Full CLI-based re-index
• Tested latest EE with various versions/brands of MySQL
• DB contained 800,000 SKUs (thanks Magento performance team)
• Bare metal configuration of:
• Dell R420 – Dual E5-2420 6-core
• H710 512MB NV + 4 x 15K 300GB RAID 10
• 24G RAM
• Ok ok, let’s see what we’ve got!

28. Magento CLI Re-index (EE)
Time In Seconds
3100
3150
3200
3250
3300
3350
3400
3450
3500
3550
MySQL 5.1.71
Percona Cluster 5.5.34
MariaDB 10.0.10
MySQL 5.6.17
Percona Server 5.6.17

29. Magento CLI Re-index (EE)
Time In Seconds
0
5
10
15
20
25
Percona Server 5.6.17
MariaDB 10.0.10
MySQL 5.1.71
Percona Cluster 5.5.34
MySQL 5.6.17
Time Spent in "sys"

30. Thoughts On The Tests
• Re-index runs, while DB intensive, are still PHP heavy
• Oracle’s MySQL did surprisingly well
• If concurrency were higher I’d expect Percona/MariaDB to excel
• DB bound writes (beyond the re-index) were missing
• This would tax the DB servers considerably
• TCP (and other) overhead for Percona Cluster doesn’t seem to kill
performance

31. Simple Step #2 –
Use a modern version of MySQL (ideally XtraDB based)

32. Hard and Solid State Disk Drives
• Hard drive vs. disk drive vs. solid state drive vs. SAS, etc.
• IOPs (I/O operations / sec)
• More is better, but don’t throw money away
• All SSDs not created equal
• Don’t believe quoted specs!
• Don’t buy consumer grade SSDs!
• Quality SSDs are ~2x the cost of quality HDD of same size
• Know your workload profile!

33. Live Client Case Study
• Magento EE 1.12.0.1
• ~700,000 SKUs
• 350+ orders / hour
• 15 x web servers (bare metal)
• Dell R420, Dual E5-2450 8-core, 24GB RAM
• 2 x DB servers (replicated) – peak @ ~20,000 qps
• 1 x file server (shared storage for media)
• FPC / Magento cache in Redis
• ~1 week sample size

34. Database Server IO Requirements
Read Write
Average IOPs: 3.66 471
Min IOPs: 0.0 6.87
Max IOPs: 830 2250
Standard deviation: 34.5 197.0
95% below: 60.4 795
99.999% below: 151 1310
• Percona Server 5.5.35
• 128GB RAM / 60GB MySQL DB (innodb_buffer_pool = 75G)
• 8 x 300GB 15k HDD/SAS RAID 10 - H700/1G RAID card
• Replicating to a hot-standby DB server (unused by Magento)
???

35. File Server IO Requirements
Read Write
Average IOPs: 13.7 7.65
Min IOPs: 5.58 2.97
Max IOPs: 85.8 186
Standard deviation: 6.72 11.0
95% below: 24.7 25.8
99.999% below: 42.3 54.6
• Serving /media and /var only over NFS
• 24GB RAM - 600GB data on disk
• 4 x 600GB 15k HDD/SAS (RAID 10) - H700/512M RAID card

36. Notes On Drives
• Get quality drives regardless of technology
• No consumer SSDs!
• Caches are very good at relieving disk-bound I/O
• MySQL query cache
• Redis/memcaches
• RAID card caches
• On-disk controller caches
• Invest in CPU over IOPs unless you can afford both
• Magento is typically bound by CPU, not I/O – Know your workload
profile

37. Simple Step #3 –
Use HDD & SSD drives as needs/costs dictate

38. Thank you!
** Thanks for not walking out while I sweat. Come collect your free bag of chips!!
CHRIS WELLS – CLWELLS -AT- NEXCESS.NET