Introducing Performance Insights - old school

For many years, we have been helping out Magento shop owners with optimizing their environment for performance. And many times we have checked for the same things: Obviously there are basic checks like caching and indexing, but other settings include the PHP output buffering, MySQL query cache and Magento attribute settings. Doing this for years, has learned us there was a lot of repetitive work.

We would not be a good developer if we did not attempt to automate these checks. So we did: We developed a semi-automated performance scan, which generated a 30 page long OpenOffice document that included numerous tips and tricks, customized for the hosting environment of a specific customer. This was all great. But the semi-automated business also required us to convert the ODT document into a PDF version, make manual changes, checkup on various settings, etcetera. We could not lower the price of the scan because of this.

The new Magento Performance Insights: Web-based and agile

With the new format of our Magento Performance Insights scan, this is changing. First of all, the scan is web-based: This means that we can now quickly add new features for all active customers. The first move was to convert all the checks into reusable chunks, each making their own calculations (query cache almost full? then increase query cache; size of all Magento tables greater than InnoDB buffer pool? then increase buffer pool) and giving their own advices. The second move was to add graphics (pie diagrams, bar diagrams, etcetera). We plan to make many more of these adjustments, with a management summary coming up first (beta 2).

We like to see our attitude towards this service as being agile: Every scan currently gets our full attention and thanks to this, we are able to quickly fix issues in the advice and create nice little addons while using the scan ourselves. We are definitely in a beta stage where we are able to help out more customers and bring added value to a scan, that is dead-cheap compared to most performance services out there.

A revamped Magento extension on GitHub

It has to be open in some way ofcourse: Our scan differentiates from other monitoring services, in that we actually combine monitoring from the inside with monitoring from the outside. For instance, it's nice to say that your frontend application loads in a specific time, but why is that? Is it due to caching issues, MySQL performance or something else? To scan Magento from the inside, it is needed to install a Magento extension in your shop, which adds a protected collectors API to the Magento application.

The source of this extension is available for free on GitHub. The paranoid can check for what kind of details we are actually gathering (and I need to stress that we do not handout your details to third party people and/or abuse the information anyway). Or other developers can take up the challenge to become our competitor ;)

Working towards a beta 2 and a stable

The current version of the service is beta 1, and we are working on a beta 2. This new version will complete some of the things we have been working on - graphics, management summary, sorted advice. Next, we will see which features will end up in the next version - which is either going to be a beta 3 or a stable. We are definitely eager to include a constant monitoring service for key values like the MySQL query cache, Redis database and alike. Other useful features will be sharing the scan with third party developers (so basically frontend ACLs), favorites of certain actions and an easier (and faster) way of collecting details.

Added value of our scan

If you have a slow Magento site, you can hire a third party developer for spending a couple of days on finding out which performance issue occurs where. The end result might be that you are paying for a couple of hours of work that actually lead to generic conclusions. It is exactly in that area that our Magento Performance Insights scan wins time and saves you money: It gives you the end conclusion on various topics, so that you don't need to bother about the basics but can focus on the actual tuning instead.

Checkout our details to learn more.