Category: Magento

I have been using Magento for ecommerce development and really like it. I’ll share tips and advice for working with it and improving your Magento Development.

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MageSpeedTest.com with Siege – Performance Testing Magento Made Easy

Just a quick little note. I took the work I had done in this article on siege testing Magento and basically made it into a little script you can run to test your own Magento store from the comfort of your web browser.

You can see the app in action at Magento Speed Test.

The features include:

  • Testing for a specified amount of time with a specified number of concurrent users.
  • Having your results emailed to you when they are ready.
  • Optionally choosing to publish your results to the home page
  • Tweet your results.

Note that you do need a standard Magento sitemap.xml in order for the testing to work properly. But you should have one anyway.

It’s still in beta mode – but I’d really love for people to try it out and give me some feedback and ideas. Here are a couple of features I think would be cool:

1) Run tests every 12 or 24 hours against various hosting company demo stores. That way we’ll get to see how they are performing and who is the fastest (for my little test at least).

2) Show a leader board for the home page, not just the 5 latest published results. I could add comments/notes so people can learn tips and tricks for speeding up Magento.

3) Less cool but important, I need to optimize the App with some memcaching – the Google App Engine Gods get angry when you run lots of un-cached queries.

But I’d appreciate hearing your feature ideas.

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MageMojo Magento Hosting Review (and Free Magento Hosting!)

I haven’t reviewed a Magento host on my blog for a long, long, time. That’s not because I haven’t had a bunch of companies ask me to, but because none of them offered anything really compelling or different to my go-to-magento-hosting-recommendation, Nexcess.

Well, that was until a few weeks ago when MageMojo set me up with a demo account and invited me to take a test drive of their new Magento optimized hosting environment. A few features the Mojo team mentioned piqued my interest, so here I am, putting their Magento hosting platform to the test and reporting my findings.

Oh, and the free hosting, MageMojo have offered to give away 12 months of free Magento hosting as part of this review, that’s over $700 worth of magento hosting, quite a generous offer. Seeing as there’s a few hundred eager Magento users and developers that come by here, I thought it’d be a great prize to offer all of you. You have to read to the end to find out how to win it, hah!
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Laying Siege to Magento: Performance testing your Magento webstores

As I alluded to in my excuses for not posting in ages blog post the other day I am working on a new Magento hosting review for a company called MageMojo. In doing so I’m trying out the performance testing tool called Siege. Siege was mentioned several times at the Magento Developers Paradise, so I have been wanting to try it ever since.

This is a little article that summarizes the steps I took to do the testing, in case you want to test your own Magento stores.

Update: I have since created a tool that will allow you to run testing like this from the comfort of your own web browser. Check out the automated Magento performance testing at MageSpeedTest.com.

Get a Server

Being all the way over in New Zealand pretty much means performance testing Magento from here is out of the question. I fired up an Amazon EC2 small instance for the purposes of testing for a few hours, 20c – I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again, commodity computing is the future . I won’t bore you with a tutorial on starting an EC2 server, there are enough perfectly good guides already online.

You could optionally use a server you already have, or run this from your own computer at the office or home. It would arguably be a fairer test of latency, not running the tests in a production data centre!

Definitely do not run it from the server that is running Magento, that would be a poor test; a) because there would be no latency and b) because the server would be using resources to run the tests, and serve the webstore, that’s not very fair on it!

Install Siege

wget http://www.joedog.org/pub/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz
 
tar xvzf siege-latest.tar.gz
 
cd siege-2.71/
 
# if you're on a fresh ubuntu, get this package first
sudo apt-get install build-essential
 
./configure
 
make && sudo make install

Now you can begin a siege on your store, but first, an important warning…
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Just Checking In; Google App Engine, Hosting Reviews, but no actual Magento

Wow, where did November go? It’s been over a month since my last post and I thought I should probably just drop a quick note here to let you know what’s been going on, and what’s coming up. There’s no Magento tips or advice here though I’m afraid – but there is a little sneak peek at a project I have been tinkering around with – I’d really love some feedback on it.

What’s new

Firstly, if I haven’t been making Magento extensions or writing Magento articles for a month, what have I been doing?!
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Magento Product Audit Extension – Monitor and Record Changes to your Products

I wrote up an article over on MageBase this weekend expanding on a tip I got from the Magento Developers Paradise. In the process of writing it, I went through a worked example and as usual with articles you want to make sure the code actually runs too, so I installed it on my local test Magento. Having done all of this, it occurred to me that the only missing part of what I had done to make it into a usable extension was an implementation of this function:

class Aschroder_ProductAudit_Model_Entity_Attribute_Backend_Audit extends Mage_Eav_Model_Entity_Attribute_Backend_Abstract {
 
    protected function _afterSave() {
		// This is where we would perform the audit (or any other logic we wanted)
		// We could email the changes to a store admin, for example
    }
}

So I went ahead an put a simple little implementation in the custom backend model. The result is Magento Product Audit, a trivial little extension that will let you know when your products change, and who changed them.
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