Our site is slow..

[seanmccauley]

We have noticed that our site is much slower than many of our competitors and expect that this is affecting our organic ranking.

We are on dedicated UK Fast server with

[20/08/2013 16:44:35] Tony Jackson: Operating System: CentOS 6 64-bit
CPU: 1x Intel Xeon E5-2620 @ 2.0GHz
Memory: 8x 8GB DDR3 RDIMM
Hard Drive: 4x 128GB SSD RAID10
[20/08/2013 16:46:28] Tony Jackson: Nginx, percona, tomcat/solr, Magento CE, cat: 25200 products

I could really do with your thoughts on this page for example

http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html

[Highland]

I am not a huge fan of APC at present (PHP PECL library, not the power battery company). Maybe nginx won't segfault like Apache has been for us.

As for the hosting, what I mean is to use a load balancer with multiple servers. Will you take some performance hit in getting DB data? Probably, but very little. But you're getting far worse now with Magento so it doesn't matter how fast your machine is (like I said, it's a beast so if it's not sitting at 0.01 almost all the time you've got major issues). Remember that this impressive machine is also a single point of failure. I had an impressive box running our DB once (multiple webservers) and the RAID controller crapped out in the middle of the day. We got back up under the two hour SLA but it cost us a lot of sales.

Now we run two webservers, a multi-AZ DB (automatic failover to secondary if master dies) and all behind a load balancer in AWS. I won't pretend this isn't without any issues (we wound up in an odd instance where the DB failover didn't work as expected) but it's a lot more redundant and scalable. I bet our setup is cheaper than your behemoth, too. Remember, you still have to chew through all the code each and every time the page is loaded (your problem is processing the individual thread, not horsepower). Splitting your site amongst multiple webservers means you have scalability as well.

[seanmccauley]

Highland, Thank you for the response.

We are using memcached locally as it seems to give best results, having tried a combination of APC and memcached.

Would moving our database to a different server speed up the time to first byte(ttfp) as currently we sit with very little load on cpu? What would be the benefit?

Where you mention 'a cloud based solution' are you referring to using Cloudflare to sit in front of our server to act as a cdn and cache, or to move to a  complete cloud based solution? I assume it is their Business package you refer to which gives the ddos and other protection.

Looking at Googles pagespeed tools, out ttfp seems to be the hold-up. which then just leaves the off site code (Snapenage, Comodo, etc) bringing up the last elements.

[seanmccauley]

Thanks for this response.

We had been looking at Cloudflare and also at rearranging our server somewhat. Will let you know.

[Highland]

Magento is built on top of Zend Framework 1, a notoriously slow PHP framework. It also does some things that slow it down. Some thoughts...

1. Be sure your use the Magento caching system.
2. Move your database off to another machine. 25k products is a LOT
3. Your hosting setup is monolithic. While your box is a beast of a machine (12 threads, 64GB RAM, 4x 128GB SSD) it's still susceptible to slow-down. I bet 50 concurrent users could bring it to its knees. While CDNs can help offload some of this, I recommend the beast with a cloud based solution. I bet you could get 2 or 3 servers plus a DB server for less than what you're paying for this one beast. Then put your machines behind a load balancer. So you would have multiple web servers serving your site up, a load balancer routing traffic to the fastest one and a common DB powering it.
4. Switch to Cloudflare for your DNS. They will cache pages for you and they do it for free. They also add a layer of security.
5. Use WMT to benchmark your site speed. It tells you the load time in a handy graph. Play around with it and see what happens.

[seanmccauley]

We are using Magento on Nginxwth caching enabled with memcache

[sbrault74]

Generating the page seems to take very long. What shopping cart software are you using? Can it cache pages?

[seanmccauley]

Thanks for your reply.

This page is a better example of our problem

http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html

[sbrault74]

Your website isn't that slow from London but there lots of things you can do to improve speed:

1. Use a CDN like NetDNA to host CSS, Javascript and images. By using a CDN, you will also increase the number of simultaneous (parallel) downloads since these files will be hosted on another (sub)domain.

2. You have lots of Javascript files. Try combining them into one file.

3. Add a cache header, this will instruct web browsers to cache your images, css and Javascript files. Simply add this to your .htaccess file:

AddType image/x-icon .ico

<ifmodule mod_headers.c=""># YEAR
<filesmatch ".(ico|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|flv|pdf)$"="">Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400"</filesmatch>

WEEK

<filesmatch ".(js|css|swf)$"="">Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800"</filesmatch>

24 HOURS

<filesmatch ".(html|htm|txt|php)$"="">Header set Cache-Control "max-age=86400"</filesmatch></ifmodule>

======================================================

... and sorry for my english.

Hope that helps!

[seanmccauley]

Yes had looked at GT Metrix though not paid much attention to YSlow. Will take a look now.

However it may be of more interest to look at the speed of this page rather than homepage;

http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Sean,

Your system looks pretty decent... I guess it depends on your traffic load though.

Have you checked out your results on GTMetrix.com?

You scored well in the PageSpeed testing, but not in YSlow. I'd take a look and see if you could leverage some of the suggestions there.

Hope this helps.

Mike