Magento E-Commerce is beautifully, delightfully……slow.
My experience with the Magento E-Commerce Software (thus far):
I don’t even remember how I ran across Magento, but I think it was somewhere between Tripping over CRE Loaded oscommerce but after falling into the Hell of Zen Cart. I had just about called it quits with open source shopping cart software. The typical, cookie-cutter shopping cart solutions: Zen Cart, CRE-Loaded (and many more) are all based on the ancient oscommerce framework, and hardly any of them offer anything new, or stable for that matter.
And then I…. tripped into the pearly white gates of Magento E - Commerce. What a beautiful open source software. This software is different though. It has an actual company backing and supporting the it. I thought I had totally hit a gold mine and after reading up on the software, I knew I did!
….don’t count your chickens before they hatch. It doesn’t matter how aesthetically appealing a website is to the eye, if it isn’t functional (fast, I should say, because Magento is a billion times more functional than its predecessors) then it isn’t worth crap. I installed this sweet new software onto a shared server and boy was I un-impressed. I don’t even know what to compare the speed to. I guess you could say it was as slow as I was jumping off the diving board for the first time when I was a wee lad of 13 (I kid). A more accurate comparison would be like watching ants in an ant farm build their tunnels. Enough of my lame analogy’s for now. But it is slow!!!
What a let down…
Reluctant to give up on the software though, I just paid $100 bucks (per year) for simplehelix.com web hosting. They brag about being able to host Magento. I haven’t had time to experiment with the actual speeds, but I sure do hope it goes quick. Magento is awesome! ……awesome if it will go fast of course.
Importing Products
Throughout my time watching the ants build their tunnels, I think I discovered how to mass import products into the new store. The site went so slow that I couldn’t ever confirm or deny that my testing was right.
Later… I’ll update my findings as well as any tips or tricks associated with the perils of setting up this beautifully wicked software.
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I feel your pain, unfortunately.
Real slow on my host’s server. Ready to throw in towel on support also.
With a company backing it, not sure if it’s begging for paid support since the community forums are light in attendance.
Nonetheless, could be a great program. I like aspects to it but have loads of questions on layout,going unanswered, also unfortunately.
Would really like to hear more thoughts on Magento.
The community support is a shame. It’s just about as slow as the software. On the other hand, a lot of things have changed since version 1.0. I’m now running version 1.1.3 on a dreamhost shared server for one of my company’s and (about 130 products) and it’s running surprisingly quick. We’ll see what happens when we get a surge of traffic though. We haven’t launched yet.
As far as your quest for support goes: you may try hanging out in the Magento chat room. I’ve found quite a few answers to my questions with people that are willing to share their knowledge with me if I do the same for them.
Also, feel free to shoot me an email with a specific problem you’re having. I’ve been through the ropes a few times with this software over the last little bit and have learned a lot. If I know the answer to your question, I’ll post it here on my blog so the rest of the world can benefit.
Thanks for checking out my blog. I’ll try to post more tips on specific Magento related problems I had and overcame.
been looking around for a dreamhost alternative, but found this tip from a ’silver’ magento host:
http://www.crucialwebhost.com/blog/improving-magento-speed-and-performance-with-mysql-query-cache/
might try that before i switch.
Right on man! Thanks for the tip. I skimmed over your link, but I’m going to read more in depth tomorrow. I’m sure there are some things worth knowing for sure.
my next choice would have been Mediatemple, but they also seem to be slow (or not at all, as they don’t have PHP5) so i’m now left with 3 options, these are their demos:
SimpleHelix: http://www.magentify.com/
Crucial: http://www.magentocontainers.com/
NuBlue: http://www.nubluemagento.co.uk/
with a table of performance: http://tinyurl.com/5le2fl
that table came from this thread, all three companies talking to eachother about speed:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/5818/
I stated this:
“I’m now running version 1.1.3 on a dreamhost shared server for one of my company’s and (about 130 products) and it’s running surprisingly quick.”
Above. That statement no longer holds water. Since I stated this, I’ve gone back to the safe ground - SimpleHelix. Do not set up magento on dreamhost. You’ll be sorry. Definitely a waste of time.
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I have been playing with 1.1.6 and its still REAL SLOW.
Its still slow with one user even after a couple of tweaks!
I’m looking for another free/open source cart and I’m not sure which cart I should use. Its seems real hard to find a cart that is ready to use, well documented, easy to mod and with a responsive community. I have been looking in to Satchmo (built with django/python) and it seems the best thing I have found so far. There is also Opencart.
Drupals ubercart seems buggy at version 1.5 which I think its supposed to be a stable version (1.6 just came out yesterday)
@Orion
Have you tried hosting your store at SimpleHelix? I have a few stores that are running (pretty much) flawlessly on my SimpleHelix hosting plan. The stores are snappy, and the customers seem to love the experience. They have even compared the shopping experience to Amazon’s.
As far as searching for another open source cart, I honestly doubt you’re going to get very far. I searched high and low and Magento was the best I could find. They continue to improve and the support is slowly getting better. You can find quite a few tips on my new blog http://HowToInstallMagento.Com.
Best of luck.