Super Fast Page Load Ecommerce Platforms
- Thread starter greenleaves
- Start date
ive worked with some really fast magento sites, like all platforms/cmss or ecommerce solutions, there are addons such as extensions, themes, widgets, plugins that can bloat down the install. combined with large images and an end user doing the administration and day to day product maintenance, you can start with sub 1sec load times and end up with several seconds when all is said and done and they have their "social bar pop up complete with live chat plugin that has an exit pop 'are you sure' with a calculated total of your cart"
ive found this to be true with most things in the internet marketing world - pick a solution, stick to it and master it. you can fuck up any solution and bloat it out.
inherently yes, a lot of these solutions are bloated by default but with a proper server tricked out with lots of RAM and a new processor you will be in a much better scenerio.
a "fast" ecommerce solution with less calls on a slow VPS with huge images and slow DNS vs a "slow" solution running from an S3 is all the difference in the world. great thread why the fuck is it in STS.
ive found this to be true with most things in the internet marketing world - pick a solution, stick to it and master it. you can fuck up any solution and bloat it out.
inherently yes, a lot of these solutions are bloated by default but with a proper server tricked out with lots of RAM and a new processor you will be in a much better scenerio.
a "fast" ecommerce solution with less calls on a slow VPS with huge images and slow DNS vs a "slow" solution running from an S3 is all the difference in the world. great thread why the fuck is it in STS.
Magento is build on the Zend framework which is massive too.
You're right about ecommerce being a hard problem to solve. Supporting variable flexibility is tough, for example. How can one product have variables like colour and size while another has height and width, when you have a single product table? How can you add variables without adding fields to the database? Magento uses the EAV model which is a very slow, hacky solution but allows maximum flexibility which they need.
That's why I used a document based database (Mongo), each product can have completely different attributes from the next product, it doesn't matter because there's no set schema. It's fucking brilliant!
nosql solves alot of issues but it's not for everyone. Here is an open source mongo ecom project, I don't know much about but for reference, Forward: The open source platform for custom e-commerce - with MongoDB
Tech reference to mongo vs rdbm's for ecommerce, MongoDB, E-Commerce, and Transactions | Architects Zone
Okay fuckers, this thread has really inspired me to cut the fat from our current custom ecom solution which I have basically hand coded from oscommerce over the last 5 years (not recommended - hundreds of hours refactoring the web frontend and making a custom backend). For those that care it looks as good as Magento, or better and nothing like the steaming pile of crap that a typical oscommerce install would look like.
Anyhow, I added a really cool faceted search feature a while back which is easily as good as eBay's / Amazon's in terms of functionality. However, I must have been smoking crack or something as up til yesterday it has been making 20-200 mysql queries per page load depending on the max number of products selected. In turn, this was adding 0.5 -2 seconds to page load time and I have been noticing during heavy traffic periods it has been maxing out our small Amazon RDS database instance's cpu.
Anyway, not only have I refactored that shit over the last day down to 3 queries + 0.1-0.4 seconds per page load, but the faceted search nav now loads asynchronously via AJAX (jQuery) so the rest of the page loads first (.1-.3 seconds total page generation time).
Oh yeah, and did I mention, I also took your very kind advice gents and I have coded up product listing snippet caching (expiring and re-caching on a rolling 24 hr basis). Bear in mind that previously, product listing snippets auto genned human readable text using a couple of link tables: aka another dozen mysql queries on every page load. Caching the generated html has allowed me to achieve the fast-ish page gen times above. I have also implemented caching on product info page / header / footer which were all previously autogenned with multiple db queries for every page load.
Next step, move all images to S3 / cdn. Still serving that shit off the main domain(s) of our ecom stores.
tldr: This is one of the best threads I have read on here in ages. thanks for the motivation.
Anyhow, I added a really cool faceted search feature a while back which is easily as good as eBay's / Amazon's in terms of functionality. However, I must have been smoking crack or something as up til yesterday it has been making 20-200 mysql queries per page load depending on the max number of products selected. In turn, this was adding 0.5 -2 seconds to page load time and I have been noticing during heavy traffic periods it has been maxing out our small Amazon RDS database instance's cpu.
Anyway, not only have I refactored that shit over the last day down to 3 queries + 0.1-0.4 seconds per page load, but the faceted search nav now loads asynchronously via AJAX (jQuery) so the rest of the page loads first (.1-.3 seconds total page generation time).
Oh yeah, and did I mention, I also took your very kind advice gents and I have coded up product listing snippet caching (expiring and re-caching on a rolling 24 hr basis). Bear in mind that previously, product listing snippets auto genned human readable text using a couple of link tables: aka another dozen mysql queries on every page load. Caching the generated html has allowed me to achieve the fast-ish page gen times above. I have also implemented caching on product info page / header / footer which were all previously autogenned with multiple db queries for every page load.
Next step, move all images to S3 / cdn. Still serving that shit off the main domain(s) of our ecom stores.
tldr: This is one of the best threads I have read on here in ages. thanks for the motivation.
First, thanks everyone for the contributions, this thread is awesome.
Now, when I ask questions, I don't just sit on my dainty little hands and touch my penis. No. I go out and look.
So, I've checked out Zen (no likey), Shopify (ok, but not very flexible), Magento (bloated and needs heavy customization), Volution (slow!) and a few others are no-gos.
I'm really leaning toward a hosted solution; coding/servers is not my strong side. I just need to find a good hosted solution within my budget.
I was looking at goecart.com and got really, really horny. But I'm just not ready to sink that kind of money in an all in one solution (they have some really awesome CRM, stock and other systems management all integrated. In fact, they integrate chat and toll free numbers with customer profiles to auto record and associate all communication... fucking sick) These guys have some heavy hitters in the eCommerce arena. I remember in the late 90s my dad buying my agro-skates on one of the sites that is currently on their platform.
I really liked what I saw from bigcommerce.com - especially the integration with other systems like Microsoft RMS. Anyone have any experience with that? It sounds really slick. I love the idea of centralizing.
I'm still pending looking into opencart, prestashop and a couple of others. I'll report back with my findings. Also, post an update on what I end up going with.
@spitfire, I agree with you ion lobster and picnics. But anal sex and champagne? I LOVE anal sex and champagne, especially the two together. Also, if you want to move images onto a CDN that is free, check out google apps, I host my images from their servers:
http://24ways.org/2008/using-google-app-engine-as-your-own-cdn/
It isn't the best, I'm sure almost anything paid is faster. But it is a decent solution to balance your loads.
Now, when I ask questions, I don't just sit on my dainty little hands and touch my penis. No. I go out and look.
So, I've checked out Zen (no likey), Shopify (ok, but not very flexible), Magento (bloated and needs heavy customization), Volution (slow!) and a few others are no-gos.
I'm really leaning toward a hosted solution; coding/servers is not my strong side. I just need to find a good hosted solution within my budget.
I was looking at goecart.com and got really, really horny. But I'm just not ready to sink that kind of money in an all in one solution (they have some really awesome CRM, stock and other systems management all integrated. In fact, they integrate chat and toll free numbers with customer profiles to auto record and associate all communication... fucking sick) These guys have some heavy hitters in the eCommerce arena. I remember in the late 90s my dad buying my agro-skates on one of the sites that is currently on their platform.
I really liked what I saw from bigcommerce.com - especially the integration with other systems like Microsoft RMS. Anyone have any experience with that? It sounds really slick. I love the idea of centralizing.
I'm still pending looking into opencart, prestashop and a couple of others. I'll report back with my findings. Also, post an update on what I end up going with.
@spitfire, I agree with you ion lobster and picnics. But anal sex and champagne? I LOVE anal sex and champagne, especially the two together. Also, if you want to move images onto a CDN that is free, check out google apps, I host my images from their servers:
http://24ways.org/2008/using-google-app-engine-as-your-own-cdn/
It isn't the best, I'm sure almost anything paid is faster. But it is a decent solution to balance your loads.
Good, you'll fit right in at Wickedfire.
Quote is from the late Christopher Hitchens.
Opencart is something I have seen in the wild a few times and it has looked good on a cursory glance. I would recommend giving it a closer look.
I would always steer away from SaaS/hosted solutions personally because you are locked in and a hostage to fortune. But that is easy to say if you are comfortable with coding / server maintenance. If not, having this taken care of (to an extent) by the provider could be reassuring I imagine.
EDIT: I have reduced my product page load (html generation) time from > 1.5 sec to <0.25 sec. This makes me very happy.
Any suggestions for deferred loading of below the fold product thumbnails on an older static html ecom site?
I was looking at Yui ImageLoader (below the fold example) but is there something better?
I was looking at Yui ImageLoader (below the fold example) but is there something better?
Ive had a few companies give me quotes on carts while at other companies, a lot of them would also try to recommend PrestaShop. I've never dealt with it, but it comes up often with Magento and oSc and OpenCart
