Magento is an eCommerce platform that is catching the world of business by storm. Magento is in truth ahead of its time as the standards it sets cannot be compared to other platforms. Besides the plenty of features which are a characteristic of Magento, it also includes a high-security level in which the customers’ personal information is well protected. The adaptation of Magento has been quite rapid in the business environment as people rush to go and reap its benefits which are usually to promote the growth of the business as well as creating a solid foundation. Despite the operation speed which Magento provides its customer base, professional Magento developers have pinpointed improvement of Magento performance even further as their number one goal. This means that the improvement of the performance of this platform is nothing but good news for business as the enhancement of Magento’s speed will result in businesses encountering faster growth rates. This continuous desire to improve the platform’s performance has earned the platform some deserved praise and with it, plenty of more customers have joined the community.
Magento allows one to make several enhancements in its installation and perhaps one of the most important enhancements you can make is the proper configuration of your MySQL database server. In order to ensure that you properly configure this MySQL database server, it is essential that you have a low-level understanding of the mostly the RAM available as well as the underlying hardware. Query caching is the most important MySQL configuration parameter you could make changes to. This process requires little understanding to fully implement and the results are simply astounding as significant performance improvements are made. Caching is a strategy that can prove to be extremely useful when using Magento. However, just like any other strategy you may intend to use, it requires that you understand the available technologies as well as consider and reevaluating your resources and goals and also be aware of the changing technologies. In Magento serve utilization as well as the responsiveness level are quite crucial to the success of the eCommerce store.
MySQL caching improves the website in terms of speed and economic. Magento is a database driven platform and it will thus involve an overwhelming number of database read and access operation with these queries changing very little over time. Caching will improve the performance of the site as commonly-needed information is stored and retrieved from memory rather than the disc. Using caching will make your customers impressed with the performance of your site as the stuff loads quickly as a result of using this strategy. This improvement in speed may seem unnecessary as a result of Magento’s already impressive performance but considering that a 2% boost in speed made large corporations such as Walmart increase their sales while a 1 second delay cost StrangeLoop at least 7% in sales, it then becomes clear how much business growth is reliant on even the tiniest bit of improvement in Magento’s performance. Caching is also crucial to a website as it can result in your website being placed higher in the Google search rankings. This is because research carried out illustrated that businesses with faster sites tend to be ranked above the slow sites. In terms of economics, caching can be extremely useful as it would allow one to minimize the computational resources that they need. Many resource-intensive database calls are quite expensive and it is why using an in-memory cache to serve pages is cheaper as fewer infrastructures, as well as hardware upgrades, are needed to serve many customers.
The process of MySQL caching is unique for each Magento platform as the demands of the businesses will differ. Hence, the strategy of one-fits-all is not applicable, this means that each business will have to uniquely configure their platform to meet the demands of their site or rather reach the target they are aiming at.
A series of database queries are made every single time that a Magento page is loaded and this simply means that the database servers must initiate and start their work. The default process of Magento is that the parsing of the query will be followed by its execution. Thereafter, the retrieval of data is made from the storage media or disk. Before the information can be returned to the client it has to be first sorted or manipulated. This whole process results in slower disk access as well as slow performance.
The query_cache_size is a built-in configuration parameter provided by MySQL and it instructs the server to store the results of the query not in the disk but this time in the memory which logically leads to faster access. The amount of memory available to your MySQL server will determine the number of query results cached as well as the actual size of the cache. For instance, if we take a hosting environment which has 1GB allocated RAM, the query cache size can be either 64MB or even larger as this number is determined mostly by the number of services running on the server.
A query cache size of 64MB will ensure that query results are stored in the RAM rather than the disk. For storing queries, this allocated size is quite large and will store large amounts of data.
This query_cache_size is the most misused performance feature of the MySQL. One can argue that this built-in configuration has resulted in a lot of faster websites and that the bigger the size the better the performance. However, while the thinking behind this logic is understandable, it is entirely wrong. Assuming that your host environment provides you with 32 GB of Ram, then would the allocation of at least 4 GB of memory to the query results in impressive performances? The answer is a big no. This is because bigger is not always better in using a cache. This is because a large query cache will mean that the validation of the subset of queries will take a long time. During this time no other operations take place as the server is frozen until this process is completed. This means that for a large query cache, the amount of inactivity will be extremely high. It is highly recommended that extremely large caches should not be used. The recommended size for this built-in configuration has to be not more than between 100 MB -200 MB. While the 64 MB may appear to be extremely small for other people, it can actually result in about 10 times the performance compared to the default setting even when 80,000 products are included in a website utilizing Magento. Hence, using large cache sizes will only result in performance degradation as a result of cache locking and overhead. The improvement of the performance of Magento will require you to have a little understanding of MySQL configuration. This understanding will take you a little time and it is thus essential that you keep up to date with the information as a little knowledge about the workings of the database server can be the difference between increased sales and a stunted growth.