
Does anyone use Magento in production? - amac
Our company is thinking about Magento for a new ecommerce site. We use a proprietary solution right now and plan to use something less expensive and more developer/customer service friendly for this new site.<p>Typically, the big guys run Websphere or ATG (well out of our budget) but can we achieve similar with Magento? Would it be the right choice? I've read there are things to overcome in regards to performance?<p>The largest company in our sector, Harbor Freight, appear to be running Magento at scale ok.
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itsprofitbaron
I have used several shopping platforms and I consider Magento to be far
superior to other shopping platforms that I have used – although, at first I
was pretty critical of it.

My initial criticisms of Magento (particularly versions before 1.4) were
around its performance issues. However, they have improved this significantly
and are getting better although like anything, if you want Magento to be fast
and scalable you need to have some knowledge of PHP and Web Server
configuration so that you can easily optimize Magento’s caching to your
particular store(s).

Having said that, some "quick wins" I found to improve performance and
scalability of Magento were:

Reduce HTTP Requests - Optimising your theme, cropping your images etc

Use a CDN

Enable Block Caching where it makes sense - have a look at
[http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/5_-_modules_and_developm...](http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/5_-_modules_and_development/block_cache_and_html_ouput)
for more details

Instead of using mod_php use FastCGI to Run PHP – if you have to use mod_php
turn KeepAlive Off

Delve into the Configuration settings & disable modules which aren’t essential
to your store - System -> Configuration -> Advanced -> Advanced

Likewise, some other big/notable players using Magento include:

Warby Parker - <http://www.warbyparker.com/>

Overstock Deals - <http://www.overstockdeals.com/>

Gap/Blue Navy/Banana Republic/PiperLime/Athleta – <http://www.gap.com>

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stevekemp
[I work for a hosting company.]

Magento is very very very heavyweight. We've had the best success with running
it behind varnish, via the varnish plugin.

Other minor wins involve using memcached for caching, and applying the tweaks
you mention.

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1123581321
I have several friends at a Magento consulting company. You need to do two
main things:

1\. Run Magento Enterprise on the _best_ servers. Enterprise scales better
with SKUs and traffic, and you don't want a lot of servers because you pay a
lot per year per server for Enterprise. I'm talking about 192GB RAM and so on.

2\. Cache everything using Magento's tools and by putting lots of Varnish
servers, Memcached, balancers etc. in front of your Magento server(s). Be very
careful about clearing Magento's caches because it'll probably bring your site
down.

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rome390
Magento is a beast, but more than capable of handling heavy load and a large
set of products __if configured correctly.

Currently we host a 6 node enterprise cluster; utilizing varnish and
memcached.

The biggest downside to magento is learning the platform, there are lots of
quirks and oddities that tend to pop up.

Also beware of magento connect! It's not that most of the modules available
are bad (believe me there are a bunch that are), but when you never want to
use the auto-install functionality built into the admin. I have seen a few
attempts where people (mostly unqualified) will go ahead and install something
to get a particular feature. This ends up leading to the entire installation
becoming hosed.

(<http://alanstorm.com/category/magento>) This guy has a bunch of extremely
useful information about magentos' internal functionality and is a great place
to start when questions arise.

heres a link to a performance white paper they put out a little while back,
but is still relevant.

From magento <https://info.magento.com/PerformanceWhitePaper.html> (they will
send an email with link to download) OR download directly here
[http://www.filedropper.com/magentoperformancewhitepaper-
eev1...](http://www.filedropper.com/magentoperformancewhitepaper-eev1-91)

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websitescenes
Every experience I've had with Magento and Virtuemart has been horrible. I
always got the systems to do what I wanted but it always felt like hacking.
Too many hoops to jump through. If you have the skill, I would make a system
that does exactly what you want.

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sleighboy
1\. Resource hog

2\. Bad code structure rooted in Zend Framework

3\. Has fostered a community of developers that create poor-quality extensions
or dev. shops that will bleed you dry.

4\. Not built to work well out-of-the-box with the various caches you'll need
to make it usable.

5\. Horrible docs

It's not worth the headache.

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Rulero
Got any suggestions as to alternatives?

~~~
devonbarrett
Opencart is very lightweight in my experience.

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arkitaip
It's a resource hog, suffers from XMLitis and theming is much more complex
than your typical CMS without giving you any significant advantage.

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amac
Thanks for the suggestions/advice. I'll need to think seriously about whether
to go with this or look for something else proprietary.

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digitalpacman
toms.com uses it.

