Category: Magento Speed Test

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MageSpeedTest.com: New locations, Magento Extension, REST API, Featured Host and Pricing

Way back in 2010 I set up a quick little wrapper around siege for testing Magento stores and for the last nearly 2 years I’ve added features such as multiple data centers, premium subscriptions, monitoring alerts, and automated host comparisons. In this blog post I’ll walk you through an update on the new features and improvements to MageSpeedTest.com over the last few months.

I’m really happy with the site and how it helps users identify and improve Magento performance. I often see test results coming through in the order of 2-3 transactions per second and >5s per transaction. Identifying these sort of slow stores early is important – customers are simply not going to wait at least 5 seconds to see a product page these days.

At the opposite end of the performance spectrum I see public tests coming through with incredible performance profiles. For these developers and server admins it’s a way to consistently test server tweaks and tuning to get the absolute best customer experience.

In this post I wanted to quickly cover my latest Magento Speed Test changes. It’s a big update because I haven’t posted anything in a while.

Here’s the cliff notes:

  • New Locations: Japan, South America and Australia
  • A Magento Extension to make testing easy (and more soon!)
  • A REST API for accessing your monitoring results
  • A pricing update, $5 up to $9 per month
  • Featured Magento hosts
  • SSL support – test https:// sites

For more information on these items, please read on.
Continue reading MageSpeedTest.com: New locations, Magento Extension, REST API, Featured Host and Pricing

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New Look for Magento Speed Test, Thanks to Twitter Bootstrap.

Today I released the new look for my Magento Speed Test site – it’s a tool for running Siege tests on your Magento stores. The old version looked pretty shit, in hindsight, so this should be a significant improvement. If you’ve met me you’ll know I don’t have a designer bone in my body, so you’d be justified in feeling dubious that I actually put a modern look on Magento Speed Test. The secret was my discovering (albeit months late) the Twitter Bootstrap css framework for web applications. It’s truly brilliant, and the documentation is very helpful – also it’s only one of many open source projects Twitter has made available.

If you look at my new look site and compare it to the standard examples from Twitter you’ll notice I’m not as creative as it might outwardly appear. I do like the simple clean lines and consistent colors provided by default, so I’m sticking with them for now.

Particular Framework Highlights

Some of the best things about the bootstrap framework from my point of view were:

  • Small and easy to include – just one CSS and some optional JS.
  • Consistent buttons as both <a> and <button> markup
  • Predefined and worked examples of grid layouts that work
  • The optional JS can do cool things like emulate #anchor functionality for menus. (self referential source alert!)
  • Simple HTML for most elements made it really easy to convert the old jsp files to the new look

And no real issues to complain about, it just works! Kudos to Twitter, will trade again.

If you haven’t already, go run a test, I bet the results will surprise you!

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Sitemap Indexes now supported on MageSpeedTest.com

Long time, no post. Sorry about that. I’ve been very busy working on an app for aggregating ecommerce orders on your mobile device. Check out the sneak peek from twitter. I’m also looking for some private beta testers so if you’re keen to try it out and willing to give us some helpful feedback, flick me an email.

Anyway this is just a quick update on some features (arguably fixes) I added tonight for MageSpeedTest.com. The first is support for multiple sitemap files in a sitemap.xml index file. The second is support for gzipped sitemap files (but only if they are references in the sitemap index).

I have also implemented a couple of measures to prevent the number of links getting out of hand. Firstly for very large sitemaps once I have 10000 links for a single site, I stop collecting them. Secondly if a site does have over 10000 links, I cache them instead of fetching them on each and every speed test.

This caching has been implemented to preserve system resources, now that the servers are monitoring and testing hosts regularly there’s a decent amount going on and I don’t want the test performance to suffer due to downloading millions of URLs from sitemaps unnecessarily.

There are still some outstanding issues with MageSpeedTest.com – if you have emailed me about them be assured I will get to them!

Stay tuned for some posts on my experiences developing the mobile web app, using jQuery mobile and Google App engine.

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Monitor your Magento Store with MageSpeedTest.com

I snuck/sneaked out a new feature for MageSpeedTest.com last week: Performance Monitoring.

Basically it’s the same simple Magento performance test you know and love, run every 6, 12 or 24 hours. If the results of the regular tests differ by more than your preset tolerance, you get an email warning you – simple.

I wanted to soft launch it to a) try it myself in production for a while and b) get some tester feedback.

So with positive results from both I am now officially announcing the new Magento Monitoring feature and inviting you all to try it for free!

Continue reading Monitor your Magento Store with MageSpeedTest.com

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Magento, Google XML Sitemaps and my Magento Speed Test

My Magento performance testing tool Magento Speed Test uses a Google sitemap.xml to determine which urls should be tested. Having only just released the latest version I have been keeping an eye on the testing over the last few days and have noticed a few tests that never got results. This sometimes happens because of a mistake by me, but more often it’s because people find creative ways to muck up their sitemap.xml, and so the test then runs on no urls, and thus – no results. Here are some tips to check for problems.

After I sighed publicly about the various issues with sitemaps I was seeing a few internet friends asked for some more information, so here is a guide to a good sitemap.xml for performance testing Magento – I’ll do my best to keep updating this as I find more issues.
Continue reading Magento, Google XML Sitemaps and my Magento Speed Test