Magento Performance Question

Question

I have version 1.3.2.4, which stores 2 Store Views and 2734 products. The site visits about 15,000 visits per month.

Apache and MySQL (mainly Apache) most often consume about 1.5 GB of RAM, and peaks exceed 3 GB. My questions, given the statistics, is this normal? It seems like a lot.

If this memory usage is actually abnormal, is it possible to upgrade to version 1.4.1.1?

Answer 1

If you count your stores, then you are fine. But with regard to the traffic you receive, it seems that you need to provide additional Magento features so that it can run. To do this, you can have some of the following functions: -

• Install APC (alternative PHP cache) or XCache (or any other option) and configure its use in your Magento back-end. This greatly increases the speed of Magento.
• Magento cache can be stored in memory (tmpfs on Linux).
• You can also tell Magento to save sessions to Memcache so that your sessions are in memory and distributed.
• Check the Magento Index Management section for any index requirements, every month or every two months. If you find the right indexing, do it immediately and clear the cache from your cache management.
• Check your database every week or every two months for any overhead in any of the database tables. If you find any overhead, then optimize these tables immediately.

Try reading a few of these articles to learn more about this.

In addition, upgrading to 1.4.1.1 will help you in terms of the capabilities provided by Magento. But for performance, I think it's better to wait a little while until Magento releases its version 2 on the market, in which some performance problems can be resolved by Magento.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

1.3.2.4 - a good stable release, updating to 1.4.0.1 is very painless and will give you the added benefit of managing the split index and a much faster administration area (updating the bulk attribute has been fixed).

You should not worry too much about memory usage, depending on the number of Apache modules loaded, you should expect to see about 30 MB per child. As long as you do not change or encroach on your limits, you should not have any real concern about how much is consumed. Disabling unused modules can help reduce memory footprint - but honestly, not with any noticeable difference.

You can always throw Nginx in front as a reverse proxy to serve static content requests and handle PHP / dynamic reqs. back to apache. This way you can keep Apache's modular build with .htaccess support and significantly reduce your overhead.

However, this can be done with additional information, such as using

free -m

To find out how part of the memory is allocated.

I would suggest that you download tuning-primer.sh to work in your MySQL configuration. This will give a good (entry level) indicator of how efficient the allocated memory is.

Answer 3

These characteristics look pretty typical for Magento, if you think that a single page load / download can use up to 64 MB of RAM.

Apache settings can also significantly affect the amount of RAM used by your system. Upgrading a Magento installation may result in a small performance improvement, but don't expect it to do much to consume memory, etc.

If your memory consumption is a real problem for you, you have several possible ways to reduce resource use, for example:

• Install Nginx as the reverse caching proxy for apache (apache is a beard and does not serve static content well).

• Use Nginx + PHP Fast CGI and uninstall apache

• Try using a working MPM module for apache or Fast CGI.

• Install a caching proxy such as Varnish / Squid.

• If you are stuck with apache, you can tweek KeepAlive and other settings to reduce memory usage.

• Tweek MySQL settings such as query caching to use resource / resource performance

I found 1. to work very well in reducing CPU / memory usage, as this will allow Nginx to serve static images, etc., without requiring apache to run RAM, trying to serve them.