Imagine 2014: The Devil is in the Details How to Optimize Magento Hosting to Increase Online Sales

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(No Transcript)
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How to Optimize Magento Hostingto Increase
Online Sales
The Devil is in the Details
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Introduction
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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

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Case Study Mystery of the Locked DB

• Zarpo.com is the first and largest flash sale
  travel website in Latin America
• Based in Sao Paulo Brazil
• Zarpos objective is to provide the best online
  user experience to demanding Latin American
  travelers
• Running a highly customized deployment of Magento
  Enterprise Edition

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Case Study Mystery of the Locked DB

• Monday, January 13, 2014 Catastrophic Event
• 1237 PM Critical ticket opened with ZeroLag
  Support Zarpo is badly down
• 1248 PM Initial trouble analysis complete
  MySQL crash
• Extremely high volume of queries locked up the DB
• 104 PM ZeroLag engineer kills queries and
  restarts SQL site back online
• 122 PM Queries continue to pound SQL for
  reasons unknown. ZeroLag staff keeps SQL online

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Case Study Mystery of the Locked DB

• Monday, January 13, 2014
• 427 PM Root cause deep dive begins
• Team is assembled DBA and senior Magento / Linux
  engineers

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Case Study Mystery of the Locked DB

• Monday, January 13, 2014
• 500 PM DB diagnostics and configuration
  analysis begins
• 618 PM Test environment is set up to focus on
  DB cache under load

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Case Study Mystery of the Locked DB

• Tuesday, January 14, 2014
• 815 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

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Case Study Mystery of the Locked DB

• Tuesday, January 14, 2014
• 918 AM Solution engineering begins

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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

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Case Study Mystery of the Locked DB

• Tuesday, January 14, 2014
• Zarpo names the successful solution The McManus
  Magic Shield

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Case Study Mystery of the Locked DB

• Skype Room Chat Report from Zarpo

1/24/14, 94145 AM Alexis Manach excellent
news 1/24/14, 94156 AM Alexis Manach the
McManus magic shield is on.. 1/24/14, 94209
AM Alexis Manach and working beautifully..
1/24/14, 94243 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.
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About ZeroLag

• Get the power of 11

• Magento Platinum Hosting Partner
• Founded April 1999
• Founder, CEO Greg Strelzoff
• 80 Employees
• We never throw developers under the bus!

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Load Testing Results

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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

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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

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Environment Response Time vs. Traffic

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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)

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Cache Response Time vs. Traffic

Redis
Memcached
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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

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Real-World Testing

• Selected 5 representative Magento sites
• Tested during off-peak hours
• Abort testing at gt1 failure rate
• Generate Gatling install script for each site
• Same testing procedure as Lab tests

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Client Response Time vs. Traffic

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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

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Client Response Time vs. Traffic

• Performs better than the baseline
• Enabled a number of custom plugins
• Using Varnish and third-party plugin

www
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Client Response Time vs. Traffic

• Performs better than the baseline
• Front-end designed for Magento
• Using Enterprise Edition FPC
• Using local HTTP Accelerator

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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

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Client Response Time vs. Traffic

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Client Response Time vs. Traffic

• 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

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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

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Best Practices inMagento Development

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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

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Best Practices

• Reduce the number of HTTP requests, limit
  external requests
• Base install of Magento has lt 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

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Best Practices, cont.

• Load CSS first, JavaScript last
• Page appears to be loaded on the users 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 dont 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

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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

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A Glimpse into the Future

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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)

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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 (?h1)

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What does that look like?

• fpm
• carpartkings.com/mann-cabin-air-filter-cu-2949-2.h
  tml
• HHVM
• carpartkings.com/mann-cabin-air-filter-cu-2949-2.h
  tml?h1

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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

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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

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The Link BetweenPerformance and Conversion

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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

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How performance impacts your business

• Magento performance can set your revenue on fire

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How performance impacts your business

• But slowing down suddenly can cost you dearly!

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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)
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Relationship of load time and bounce rate

Lost Opportunity
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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

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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

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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

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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

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Thank you!
ZeroLag.com 877-ZERO-LAG