Monthly Archives - March 2023

Do you know what size server you want for your eCommerce site?

Leaving the toughest question unanswered

When signing up for your Magento hosting, the first question you see asked, before you place an order, is what size server you want. It has become so ubiquitous, that everyone just expects to answer it looking at the cost.

But this is much like Mathematics books leaving tough problems as exercise to the readers!

It should not be that way! The size and architecture of the server you need depends on many factors.

Factors to consider

  1. The traffic and pattern. We routinely ask for 2 google analytics graphs - one for a typical day and one for a high sale day. This drives the architecture and server size.
  2. Your hosting stack - are you vanilla magento? or do you use headless / PWA? or use some software for image optimisation on your server?
  3. If the live site is already hosted, current CPU and memory usage.
  4. The size of the magento database.
[porto_blockquote]luroConnect always starts an engagement with a server sizing sheet that is filled on behalf of the merchant. This allows us to propose a hosting plan on the customers cloud account and an appopriate luroConnect support plan.[/porto_blockquote]

Take the guesswork out of server sizing with horizontal scaling

A classic 3-tier architecture.

  • The web layer (WAF, apache / nginx /varnish, cron, rabbitmq),
  • the application layer (php, nodejs) and
  • the database layer (mysql, elasticsearch, redis).

Horizontal Scaling :

  • app servers can scale independently - indeed they can be autoscaled.
  • Low traffic websites can fold either the app or the db layers or both into the web layer
  • The db layer can be extended to have master slave
  • A proxy layer can load balance read traffic between master and slave, giving scalability at the database level

Would you like to switch to a modern hosting platform?

Schedule a call of a free evaluation!

With features like ~0 downtime code deploy and autoscale to reduce your hosting costs, luroConnect offers you unparalleled hosting environment for Magento.

Schedule a call and we will show you how we can

  • Improve your hosting, possibly with autoscale
  • Have a managed dev, staging and production environment
  • Server performance measured every minute with alerts for a slowdown
  • A multi point health check every day
  • Optimized hosting costs
Click here to schedule the call
March 28, 2023By hosting, Magento, Site Speed0 CommentsRead more...

luroConnect supports Hyva in its CI/CD pipeline

luroConnect CI/CD is an inbuilt feature of the luroConnect Managed Hosting Platform. Built from the ground up, it supports Magento and Mage-OS and dependent build options such as Magepack, baler and headless/PWA stacks such as ScanePWA, PWA Studio, vue-storefront.

luroConnect announces support for Hyva. To be configured as a build option, your Hyva website builds and deploys in ~0-downtime.

How does luroConnect CI/CD support Hyva?

luroConnect Ci/CD separates the build and deploy stages of your eCommerce store. The Hyva support is in the build. luroConnect builds in docker. Our Hyva docker build image contains the correct version of node and modules. The Hyva build, when enabled, takes 1 parameter

HYVA_THEMEDIR
the magento root relative themedir where the hyva build is done.
The pipeline will then do the following, before Magento static content deploy :
(cd $HYVA_THEMEDIR;
npm ci
npm run build-prod)

Kalkifashion.com uses Hyva on Magento Open Source 2.4.5. Kalkifashion.com is a premier independent Indian fashion store and has over 200 visitors on the site at any time 24x7. With such a busy website, the eCommerce manager should not be worried about code deploys giving a bad experience to visitors.

With luroConnect CI/CD offers that comfort.

Build and deploy on staging before deploying to production

luroConnect supports staging (also called pre production or UAT) and a production environment. The staging has same system component versions as production, but on a hardware that is not designed to scale. The production environment on the other hand is a multi-server 3-tier architecture possibly with autoscale.

The advantage is that code can be tested on staging before deploying to production - with confidence.

luroConnect CI/CD can deploy to staging or production.

The support for Hyva is included in both staging and production builds.

Would you like to switch to a modern hosting platform?

Schedule a call of a free evaluation!

With features like ~0 downtime code deploy and autoscale to reduce your hosting costs, luroConnect offers you unparalleled hosting environment for Magento, including a powerful written-for-Magento CI/CD

Schedule a call and we will show you how we can

  • Improve your hosting, possibly with autoscale
  • Have a managed dev, staging and production environment
  • Server performance measured every minute with alerts for a slowdown
  • A multi point health check every day
  • Optimized hosting costs
Click here to schedule the call
March 22, 2023By CI CD0 CommentsRead more...

Improving PDAStudio performance : Cache more

PWAStudio makes many "storeConfig" calls that - depending on the website - be made cacheable in varnish as they are unlikely to change. This will reduce cookie blocking - or reduce load on php if the authorization is used.

What is the session blocking problem?

When Magento (php) processes a request, the cookie passed is mapped to a session in Magento. Sessions are stored either in var/session or on production systems, in redis.

Magento will lock the session until the php code processes this request. At the end of the request the session is unlocked.

When the session is locked, any hit with the same cookie, is kept in wait state, waiting for the session lock to be released. If there are more than one hits, all hits wait. These are not kept in a ordered queue - instead they each check the state of the session every x seconds and the first one breaking in gets the session lock.

Session lock is important to process hits that update the session - login, cart operations, checkout operations can use sessions. But, the problem is that, not all hits need this lock, and Magento gives no way for a developer to hint that the hit being processed does not need a lock.

The problem with ajax calls - especially PWAStudio - is even more severe. To display a page, many calls for each component on the page are made. If all of these are to be processed by magento, they will all be queued and a single slow query can bring down the site performance.

A PWAStudio Example

As can be seen in the screen below, a page refresh of a PWAStudio website hosted on Magento Commerce Cloud, The arrows highlight the hits that are marked by Magento as non cacheable.

Analyzing the content returned by the getStoreConfig hit.
https://www.soch.com/graphql?query=query+GetStoreConfigForCarouselEE{storeConfig{store_code+product_url_suffix+magento_wishlist_general_is_enabled+enable_multiple_wishlists+__typename}}&operationName=GetStoreConfigForCarouselEE&variables={}

It is clear that these values are unlikely to be changed and can be cached by TTL alone - with a potential ability to clear varnish with a URL / regular expression to help clear the url if an occasion arises.

Improve caching

The hits marked in Blue on the right have been analyzed by luroConnect and we can suggest to cache in varnish on TTL of 1 day. Note : Varnish cache is already hashed with the store key. This is important as some of the data is store specific.

This requires a vcl change.

Yet recommending Magento Commerce Cloud for hosting?

Think again! Analysis like this is only available from luroConnect. Moreover, we will implement the vcl changes.

Would you like to switch to a modern hosting platform?

Schedule a call of a free evaluation!

With features like ~0 downtime code deploy and autoscale to reduce your hosting costs, luroConnect offers you unparalleled hosting environment for Magento.

Schedule a call and we will show you how we can

  • Improve your hosting, possibly with autoscale
  • Have a managed dev, staging and production environment
  • Server performance measured every minute with alerts for a slowdown
  • A multi point health check every day
  • Optimized hosting costs
Click here to schedule the call
March 3, 2023By caches, Magento, PWA, Site Speed, varnish0 CommentsRead more...

Meet Magento India 2023 – Speaker Talk – Improve PWA Performance

On Feb 3, 2023, our CEO Pradip Shah presented a talk titled "Improving Headless / PWA Performance" at Meet Magento India in Mumbai, India.

The premise of the talk was the observation that the Headless / PWA eCommerce world promised lightning fast websites but many have ended up with slow performance, especially as measured by Google's metrics.

This talk discussed issues and solutions that have been implemented in real eCommerce websites to increase page speed.

There are 2 versions of this for you to download

  1. The pdf version (5MB)
  2. The powerpoint version (23MB) - it has a few videos, and hence recommended to download.

Summary

Section 1 : Legacy HTML page technology is not stagnant - with Hyva and on page optimization from technologies like Nitrogen, page speeed scores of Magento traditional HTML page has improved. However, many traditional websites suffer from slower response speeds with uncached pages. Example : www.kalkifashion.com is a Hyva theme with Nigrogen front end caching and optimizaion.

Section 2 : PWA is not magic - the promise of "lightning fast" website needs work. Basic page speed principles apply and so do some new ones.

Section 3 : It is possible to make websites using Magento REST and Graphql. Each one has different challenges. REST by default does not cache and Graphql uses sessions.

Section 4 : When using graphql, avoid POST graphql for queries - use them only for mutations.

Section 5 : Study your application and you can add caching to Graphql's that Magento may mark as not caceheable.

Section 6 : Custom graphql queries result in database queries that may need optimization. A step by step method to get the underlying mysql query generated is a useful process. We used that to achieve great results. www.mysoresareeudyog.com has a custom default filter for a listing page - latest.

Section 7 : Magento 2.4.5 allows method to prevent session locking using authentication. But by default, authenticated graphql calls are not cached - an approch similar to one presented earlier will be required to ensure optimal caching is achieved.

Section 8 : Go beyond. Add logic in frontend and cache GraphQL results in the browser. This is the ultimate power of headless / PWA. It may not help with page scores that are measured without browser cache, but user experience will improve.

Section 9 : Bulid can improve page loads. Appropriate sized chunks and using hashes instead of version. Another improvement build can give is use of cookie free domains. A static domain for example for js and css bundles allows the main domain to not go through a caching layer, improving page load speed.

Would you like to switch to a modern hosting platform?

Schedule a call of a free evaluation!

With features like ~0 downtime code deploy and autoscale to reduce your hosting costs, luroConnect offers you unparalleled hosting environment for Magento.

Schedule a call and we will show you how we can

  • Improve your hosting, possibly with autoscale
  • Have a managed dev, staging and production environment
  • Server performance measured every minute with alerts for a slowdown
  • A multi point health check every day
  • Optimized hosting costs
Click here to schedule the call
March 3, 2023By Magento, page speed, performance, PWA, Site Speed0 CommentsRead more...