If you have Magento, whilst you may love the system, you will probably find admin is sometimes so slow you may dive out of the window in frustration. Editing products is a good example; open, wait, edit, wait, save, wait, wait, wait….

The obvious solution is to beef up the servers, or switch to a dedicated server. This isn’t as flip as it sounds. Magento is quite demanding but a straight forward decent server will have it running pretty fast. Here are the official Magento system requirements. In the past we tried using virtual servers for each of our magento installations but they were never very fast and bandwidth limitations from the host soon caused problems, so we are now running servers with just dual core processors and plenty of ram, so still not huge, but the site and especially admin performance is greatly improved.

Enable MySQL short term query caching – This can help. To do so go to my.cnf file and change these settings in the mysqld section to:

query_cache_type=1
query_cache_size=64M

Read more about it here on the Magento website from another agency specialising in Magento – however, everything they say here relates to general server setup and is not Magento specific. If you set your server up well you are on the road to good Magento performance.

Beyond that you can opt for specialist hosting or if you are managing it yourselves, layer the processes. More about this to follow, but really, for most websites, a dual core, or even quad core server with plenty of ram and you shouldn’t have many problems.

If you cannot beef up server performance one option to get around the slow admin is to use a remote admin manager such as Magento Store Manager from Magnetic One – a windows desktop application to manage key Magento functions remotely to greatly speed up the process. Main functions that interested us were add, delete, modify, clone, or copy products, categories, manufacturers, attributes, but it also handles import and export to excel, so you can work off line then upload changes. Especially useful for bulk catalogue changes and imports. If you’re using it, let us know what you think? We were testing this when we switched to dedicated servers and found the problem solved so did not continue.

Another inexpensive alternative that we like is Tinybrick LightSpeed which, by cutting holes in the page, effectively cuts server demand by caching and only refreshing active areas. It’s not expensive and is quite an elegant way of reducing server demand.

Ultimately you should aim for well configured and specified servers, but there are always alternatives and we know it is all about getting the best out of your budget. So, whatever you’re doing I hope this helps in some ways, but do please get in touch if you’d like to share your experiences… or have feedback.

We created an official company motto today:

Pax Volo – Peace, through speed.

Hope you get it!