Hosting server always want you to make a large

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

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.
Your hosting stack – are you vanilla magento? or do you use headless / PWA? or use some software for image optimisation on your server?
If the live site is already hosted, current CPU and memory usage.
The size of the magento database.

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.

Server Architecture anybody?

Most hosting providers are interested in selling you servers. The actual implementation of the architecture is again left as an exercise to you.

Magento is best implemented in 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).

This architecture has some advantages :

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, 2023 By Pradip Shah hosting, Magento, Site Speed 0 Comments Read 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, 2023 By Pradip Shah caches, Magento, PWA, Site Speed, varnish 0 Comments Read 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

The pdf version (5MB)
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, 2023 By Pradip Shah Magento, page speed, performance, PWA, Site Speed 0 Comments Read more...

Should I move to shopify from Magento?

The platform battle of Magento vs Shopify rages on. Increasingly merchants are moving to Shopify from Magento due to easy of operations and website management.

For many, where the decision was a no-brainer, the move has already been done.
For others, this question rages on, as shopfiy adds more features from itself and its partners in an easy to manage.

This article is written in 2022 for the “others”.

The “others” I refer to have some of these characteristics

A working eCommerce business – one that makes money, increasing the risk of a move
Migrated to Magento 2 and hence have invested in the technology
Customizations that differentiate the store and would be difficult to achieve in Shopify. These may include custom attributes, use of custom options, personalization technology, etc.
Headless frontend
Worried about data ownership

What are the pain points in Magento that makes merchants look at shopify

Managing the Agency or Magento Agencies are expensive!
Website speed scores or Magento website speed scores can be bad.
Everything is so hard in Magento compared to Shopify

What options you have to ease the pain and stay on Magento?

Managing the Agency.In my conversation with merchants unhappy with Magento, the main reason to consider a move is the performance of the Agency – i.e. they have an agency problem, not a platform problem.
- Agencies have powerful marketing presentations that appeal to the heart of an eCommerce merchant. But, a merchant should pay attention to the compatibility between of the agency to how the business operates before choosing one. Infact, it may be even desirable to manage multiple agency relationships.Some factors to consider.
- If you have an in-house project manager, you need developers – an strong in development. One of our customers has 2 agencies – a cheaper local and a more established one. Depending on the complexity of the project, they decide which agency will be best. They have their own project manager.
- Some agencies have a delivery manager that acts as a single point of contact. They work with you on your requirement, discuss with the developers and are responsible for the delivery. Ensure they communicate with all teams – including business and SEO.Some agencies offer a full eCommerce service – including SEO to development. These are very suitable for growing eCommerce arm of a omni channel merchant. Such agencies can work on outcome basis – with a profit share for example.
- A point of conflict between merchants and agencies is the business model – Agencies like an hourly billing model as it closely matches their biggest cost – the manpower used to execute the project. Many merchants may think of a fixed cost model best suits them – with outcomes well defined. Software on the other hand is very difficult to estimate, especially in an agile development world. Merchants wanting a fixed cost model should be more acceptable to cost escalations due to change requests.
- Use an expert to interface with an agency. If you have a complex project and do not have an inhouse eCommerce manager, it will be a good idea to hire an consultant to interface with the agency. The consultant can act as a project manager communicating the business needs to developers and ensuring the delivery meets the quality goals.
The user interface. From a competitive perspective, UI is the most crucial part that can help you differentiate from your competitors. A more personalized website or an emersive experience will attract more visitors to stay and purchase.But, magento websites are slow on page speed scores, especially those developed on the original Magento 2 theming, which is archaic by todays UI technology standards.The Magento UI stack is evolving. Apart from the many headless options, Hyvä Themes has completely rewritten the theme to be fast and modern.Infact, in my opinion, UI should be the main reason to stay on Magento – the ability to give the best user experience. Rather than have a single page speed goal for the website, have a more user experience view. Even google suggests to have targets for faster website and work towards achieving them.
Ease of Shopify vs Magento. A big complaint against Magento is its bloat – too many features, not many, easy to use. A customer recently made this comment when they were trying to enable the watermark in Magento. Turns out, while the watermark feature is shown in Magento’s admin dashboard, enabling it will immediately remove all images – until the developer had accounted for this in their development. The feature bloat meant the developer did not really understand why it would not work. While this feature just works out of the box in shopify.

Magento has a community

Magento has over the years grown to have a very vibrant community. Some estimates put it at over 300,000 strong. Mainly tech professionals, it also consists of many areas of eCommerce business.

For some merchants, it is important to know they (or their online business) is not beholden to a single corporation. A Shopify network for example, though very cohesive, is orchestrated by Shopify. Shopfiy does whet these vendors, but there is no assurance of quality given by Shopify on their behalf. Moreover, Shopfiy can decide to compete with one of the features with any partner in that network, making your favourite plugin obsolete.

Magento on the other hand has independent plugin developers, some of who have made a name for themselves. The agency and merchant have the task of ensuring every plugin they use is good in terms of quality and functionality.

Migration to shopify may not be all roses

On the other hand, shopify’s ease of administration can get in the way of large changes. A process has to be used including using staging site for UAT, git and tools like ThemeKit, Beanstalk and/or the shopify github app. Which brings back the agency and project management question.

Getting feature parity with a Magento website may also not be easy. One merchant moved to Shopify and lost some upsell opportunities as they had used custom options in Magento. They commissioned some custom development and realised that the agency would launch a server and store some data there. This added to a vendor lockin (their agency) they did not want.

luroConnect easing the pain of Magento and Headless/PWA

luroConnect is a managed hosting platform for eCommerce – including Magento and Headless eCommerce.

We believe in serving 2 stake holders in an eCommerce website – the developer / agency and the merchant. We have tools and features to help both. To remove the pain of taking developer code to production. luroConnect supports dev, staging and production environments, with an inbuilt CI/CD for all platforms we support, with low downtime deploys.

The luroConnect stack deploys on the cloud of customers’ choice. The production site is backed by a performance dashboard, configurable alerts and 24×7 support.

Our extensive agency network helps us match a merchant to an agency.

Considering moving from Magento to Shopify? Talk to us. We may just give you a reason to stay back!

We can analyze your site for free

Schedule a call

Not happy with your website performance and want an expert to look at it?

We will analyze your site using public information.
We will ask you to give us a 1 day web server log file.
We will try to identify what steps if any you should take to improve your sites performance goals.

Click here to schedule the call

September 24, 2022 By Pradip Shah Magento, PWA, SEO, Site Speed 0 Comments Read more...

Magento and graphql : A slowdown saga

PWA, Magento and graphql : A slowdown saga

Note : I write this article as Magento 2.4.5 is released and fixes some major performance issues that have resulted in the dream of headless and PWA go sour for many early adopters of technologies like PWA Studio and Vue Storefront 2.

PWAs and headless came with the promise of fast navigation and have had a rough ride at best, especially with Magento backends. Early PWAs like Vue Storefront 1 were implemented using Magento Rest API with a api middleware in nodejs that used elastissearch to store cached version of magento catalog for faster access. Magento implemented Graphql to avoid the need for the rest api. Use of direct rest api is ill-advised without a middleware as it exposes a Magento admin token. A middleware would sanitize the request possibly by checking a cookie and also limit the range of queries run. Graphql prevented the use of admin tokens and instead relied on frontend cookies for authentication.Magento’s REST API also results in large datasets. Graphql has a powerful, standardized query syntax to theoretically present a path breaking solution to build Magento headless around. However, early implementations did not fully cover the entire magento data model – Magento even advised the use of REST api when graphql was not sufficient. And when real world websites with large builds and catalogs were deployed, performance issues emerged.

Graphql are ajax calls in Magento that use sessions. In a typical hit processed by Magento, a session is opened, the hit is processed and then the session is closed. (A hit here is either a frontend hit or an ajax call).

Sessions and race conditions

Graphql are ajax calls in Magento that use sessions. In a typical hit processed by Magento, a session is opened, the hit is processed and then the session is closed. A hit is either a frontend hit or an ajax call.

Magento can store information in sessions – cart data for example. In order to prevent 2 hits from writing contents to the session simultaneously – called a race condition, sessions are locked for the duration of the processing a hit. (Take for example a checkout flow and let us assume that the address and payment info is written to session. You would want to ensure both get written. If both “raced”, only one piece of information would be written). Magento identifies an internal session by setting a cookie in the visitors browser. Each hit carries the cookie allowing magento to identify the session. Since a session is unqiue for a visitor, so Magento can process process only one hit per visitor at any given time.

With ajax in general and graphql in particular, many simultaneous hits may go to the server. Magento, through the session locking mechanism, queues them up. The hits are not guaranteed to be processed in the order they were received or any order in particular.

A typical session content in redis looks like

hgetall sess_eba681783f7000bc668cc45005aeaca4 1) "lock" 2) "0" 3) "writes" 4) "5" 5) "data" 6) "_session_validator_data|a:4:{s:11:\"remote_addr\";s:14:\"116.58.200.181\";s:8:\"http_via\";s:0:\"\";s:20:\"http_x_forwarded_for\";s:0:\"\";s:15:\"http_user_agent\";s:117:\"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; RMX2030) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36\";}_session_hosts|a:1:{s:10:\"host.com\";b:1;}default|a:0:{}customer_base|a:2:{s:11:\"customer_id\";N;s:17:\"customer_group_id\";N;}checkout|a:0:{}" 7) "wait" 8) "0" 9) "pid" 10) "10.0.2.197.host.com|3735" 11) "req" 12) "POST host.com/graphql"
Most of these entries are used internally by the redis session module. Entry 6 is the main session, stored in php serialized format.

If each hit takes only a few milliseconds and the number of ajax calls are not high, the overall response time may not perceptibly slow the site.

But, if even one ajax hit takes time, the page load can slow down. If a customer opens multiple tabs or refreshes the page, the slowdown may be more severe, sometimes leading to errors.

Here is an example. We are analyzing server logs based on IP. Lines 1 and 2 indicate the same link in google was clicked twice – possibly in 2 tabs on the browser. As the page loads we see graphql’s being loaded. The last 2 items are an indication of the problem.

The 2nd last hit is the slow hit – it took 10 seconds to return a result as the item was not in cache. The problem in the last hit was that it was waiting for the 2nd last hit to be processed, although in all probability it was in cache. If the number of items in this queue grows above 6 – for example if a visitor opens tabs and accesses urls not in varnish, a 500 error may be returned, possibly resulting in the UI showing a block not fully loaded at all. A refresh typically seems to solve the problem.

Server can run out of php resources

When too many graphql calls wait, server side can run short of php resources. This time you can see 504 and 502 errors. Adding more php resources for the same server risks running out of RAM. Adding more servers does help with the problem, but that is a waste of resources.

Graphql and caching issues

Graphql in Magento needs many caches to perform well. However, upon cache clear the “galloping horses” problem can bring down a busy website.

Upon cache clear the first access to graphql results in the schema being read. The performance for this action has improved substantially since Magento 2.3, but we yet highlight it as a concern. A cache warming of this is preferred.

Queries like filter in a category page can be slow and hence caching and warming some queries is always a good idea.

Enabling varnish cache is also important – varnish does not use sessions.

Recommended way to use Magento graphql

Graphql needs authorization – it needs to know what customer is asking for the information. It needs it so that the results include say for example the correct tiered pricing for this customer. While sessions include this information, they also store state and hence need the protection of a lock.

Magento supports JWT customer tokens for graphql.
https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.4/graphql/mutations/generate-customer-token.html

Use the generateCustomerToken mutation to create a new customer token.
Example :

mutation {
  generateCustomerToken(
    email: "bobloblaw@example.com"
    password: "b0bl0bl@w"
  )
}

Response

{
  "data": {
    "generateCustomerToken": {
      "token": "ar4116zozoagxty1xjn4lj13kim36r6x"
    }
  }
}

Magento suggests NOT enabling cookie and JWT token authentication at the same time to reduce the chances of encountering problems caused by the differences between the two authorization methods. However, disabling cookie was added a feature only in Magento 2.4.5

However, Magento 2.4.5 varnish sample configuration disables varnish caching for logged in user. This can reduce performance.

Conclusion

Magento performance continues to be a troublesome aspect of the eCommerce platform. At luroConnect we look at performance in great depths.

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 many scaling options to reduce your hosting costs, luroConnect offers you unparalleled hosting environment for eCommerce – specifically Magento and various PWA / Headless technologies.

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
Optimize hosting costs

Click here to schedule the call

September 12, 2022 By Pradip Shah Magento, performance, PWA, Site Speed, varnish 0 Comments Read more...

Sansec reports new Magento 1 hack

Over the weekend of Sept 11, 2020, Sansec reported a web skimming attack on Magento 1 stores. It was the largest single day automated attach recorded by Sansec.

What are skimming attacks?

“Skimming” attacks are malicious code added to your website so when a site visitor is entering any personal information including credit card, the content is “skimmed” and sent to the attacker.

The website looks completely normal.

In September 2018, British Airways revealed that 380,000 passenger information had been skimmed from the website. The modus operandi for this attack was access to the code (possibly the version control of a 3rd party javascript module used on the website). The attack went undetected for months.

Some attacks are also called “Magecart” attacks.

In Magento we see 2 popular ways

Break the admin password and upload content to “Miscellaneous Header” or “Miscellaneous Footer” sections.
Upload a php code file which in turn loads the real malicious code in javascript in the page – either directly into the page or modify a known javascript file.

The current attack is of the second variety.

Stores on luroConnect were not attacked!

The attack as described by Sansec in the article used the Magento connect to bypass Magento admin and upload malicious code in javascript files to facilitate skimming of credit card information.

luroConnect has many rules that helped prevent this attack from affecting any of our Magento 1 websites.

Rule 1 : “/downloader” URL is not accessible on any live or staging website. We expect code to be deployed through git and expect the developer to use a manual process to install modules. We disallow magento connect based installation in any of our managed websites.

Rule 2 : Our web directory owner and hosting users are different. Hosting user is the user php code runs as. Moreover, /skin folder is not writable by the hosting user.

Rule 3 : We use a static minifier and deploy the code to a folder skin.min which is not in git. The /skin folder itself is never used.

Rule 4 : Staging and dev environments are protected using a HTTP Basic Authentication. Automated attack vectors would need to add a password guesser before they can reach the staging URLs. This is assuming a developer would have relaxed permissions in the dev environment.

Rule 5 : Our platform bars ssh access to the hosting user. This prevents any accidental change in permissions being permanent. Even in the rare case ssh access is given (for debugging purposes), upon relinquishing the access, we sanitize the environment with default permissions.

How to protect your store?

One of the best ways is to sign up for Sansec’s security scanner eComscan

luroConnect is a very secure platform for Magento hosting. We call it layered security – from a secure file system and strict folder permissions, to an inbuilt WAF with configurable rules to partnering with Sansec for security scans.

We host you on your cloud or physical hardware using our stack. Learn more about our plans here.

September 15, 2020 By Pradip Shah hosting, Magento, Nginx, Security 0 Comments Read more...

Supercharge your Magento with a Varnish cluster

What is a varnish cluster?

A varnish cluster is a set of varnish nodes, each in a different geographical location, in front of the same Magento backend.

As shown a Magento hosted in the US East region can serve varnish nodes from across the world. Access to the website from each region is directed towards the nearest varnish, benefiting from lower latency and faster page loads.

If you serve customers in different regions – internationally or across the USA, your store can benefit from a varnish cluster.

Varnish and Magento performance

Magento 2 was architected to work with Varnish for improved performance. A typical webpage – category listing or product detail page – when returned from a cached varnish page (called a HIT in varnish) typically has a TTFB of a few milliseconds. An uncached page (also called a MISS in varnish) results in TTFB of a few seconds. Optimizing a MISS is very crucial, but we will not cover that in this article. We believe varnish is one portion of optimizing your website.

What is Network Latency

Latency is the time it takes for a network packet to go from your computer to the server with a request and come back with a response – assuming the response from the server was available immediately. When a page scores a HIT in varnish, the response is almost immediate from the server. Any Time To First Byte (TTFB) recorded on the browser can be attributed to network latency.

If you market your website to many regions around the world, and you host varnish in a single location, your visitors may be faced with higher latency. When latency of access is in a few hundred milliseconds, it becomes the bottleneck and needs optimization.

The below information from https://wondernetwork.com/pings/ gives an idea of expected latencies. To read the table use the row header as source and column header as destination. So, a ping latency from Los Angeles to Mumbai would be 267 msec.

What is the cause of latency?

Core latency is a function of distance – even light will take ~40msec to travel 13,000 km – the distance from New York to Mumbai. A network packet travels through wires at that speed, and network wires are much longer than a straight line. Moreover, a response packet has to travel all the way back.

Latency is also caused as traffic goes through network equipment. The number of switches / servers a packet has to go through depends on the network and service providers – yours as well as at the server you are connecting to.

A varnish cluster architecture

Using a GeoIP based DNS service such as AWS Route53 a users request for a domain is redirected to one of several IPs. The Magento backend is in the “default” region – where maximum traffic is expected. A varnish in the regions desired – shown US East and Europe below.

Geo-IP based DNS

A geoip based dns router such as AWS route53 can help direct traffic to the nearest varnish node based on the guessing the country the IP requesting name resolution is coming from. So users on a browser say in Australia would be directed to be served from the varnish node in Australia and one from the west states of California would be directed to the varnish there.

Since IP to region or country can never be so accurate, it should be possible for all varnish nodes to serve customers from any region. Specifically, a language or currency switcher should be available on the website.

Magento 2 supports multiple varnish nodes out of the box

An important feature in using a cache in production is its need to automatically and quickly clear contents on demand from the user and application. For example, when a product goes out of stock, the corresponding page should display the out of stock label. Magento uses a tag-based system to flush appropriate content from the cache. Magento allows setting up multiple varnish hosts and a tag-based cache clear is sent to all the hosts.

bin/magento setup:config:set --http-cache-hosts=<varnish internal ip>:6081,<varnish internal ip 2>:6081

Refer : https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.4/config-guide/varnish/use-multiple-varnish-cache.html

Challenges in a varnish cluster

A varnish cluster is more complex to manage

Ensure the varnish vcl files, front end security configuration (WAF, rate limiting, etc) is managed and kept in sync on all edge nodes.

Managing includes monitoring to ensure none of the servers go down. Now, your site can be down in a specific region for example. Typical monitoring tools such as Pingdom would not work. A purposeful monitoring solution is needed.

A varnish cluster costs for additional servers

Since these would be frontend servers, the amount of RAM and their network speed requirement would depend on what traffic they get.

Number of varnish nodes

Increasing the number of nodes in a varnish cluster does not always help in improving site speed. That is because each varnish node has a different hit ratio. A lower hit ratio leads to more users getting the latency and performance penalties combined – due to a varnish MISS. Traffic pattern and latency have to be taken into account to decide on how many nodes to use in a cluster.

Difficult to warm the cache

Given the distributed nature of the cache, warming each cache independently takes more resources on the server side as well as some changes to the way a cache warmer works.

luroConnect : A modern cloud hosting platform

Schedule a call of a free evaluation and demo!

Is horizontal scaling manually or with autoscale right for you?
Evaluate if a varnish cluster will help your website performance
Show managed dev, staging and production environments
How we measure application performance every minute with alerts for a slowdown
Can your hosting costs be optimized?
How improved hosting can lead to better ROI!

On Magento Cloud? We have special offers if you switch your enterprise license to luroConnect managed AWS cloud.

Click here to schedule the call

Magento Cloud and Fastly

It is important to discuss the Magento 2 cloud decision to use Fastly as a frontend.

Magento 2 cloud pro version architecture is given below. (Reference : https://devdocs.magento.com/cloud/architecture/pro-architecture.html)

The architecture uses Fastly as a Full Page Cache. Varnish is not installed on the Instances in AWS.

Fastly is a CDN that uses varnish. With the Magento 2 Cloud integration, a custom plugin is used on Magento along with a custom vcl file that runs on Fastly.

Fastly has many “POP” locations. As per fastly documentation, there are 20 POP locations in North America, https://www.fastly.com/network-map

mostly in the USA. Each has its own varnish cache. When a page is not in a POP, it fetches content from the origin. A single page may have to be rendered 20 times for each POP location in North America.

Drawbacks of this architecture from a varnish cluster perspective

More POPs do not lead to better experience as a higher percentage of MISS on varnish results in a worse experience for more users.
As POPs increase the load on Magento infrastructure increases.
It is not possible to use a cache warmer to warm the Fastly cache.

What next?

An ideal situation would be a layered varnish configuration – each “satellite” varnish node serving a local user, caching a subset of the “main” varnish node, reducing the penalty of a varnish MISS.

Share your thoughts here or on social media.

August 25, 2020 By Pradip Shah caches, hosting, Magento, Nginx, performance, Site Speed, varnish 0 Comments Read more...

Choosing Hosting platform for Magento : Digital Ocean

One in a while you may want to check on the technology and options available for Magento hosting – technologies change, hosting costs reduce, life becomes easier for you and the merchant. In this multi-part series we will explore cloud platforms and their suitability to hosting a production Magento website.

In this article we will explore how seriously you should consider Digital Ocean as a platform for hosting.

Digital Ocean (DO) offers VMs it calls “droplets”. With an excellent blog and a friendly attitude towards developers, DO is a serious hosting contender. Many developers naturally recommend using DO to merchants for hosting Magento. How real is it? Let me explore a few pros and cons.

DO Choice of vCPU and memory

DO offers “shared CPU” and “dedicated CPU”. For eCommerce hosting we always prefer dedicated CPU. Shared CPUs work differently on all cloud providers and quite often when you need it the most, you do not get enough. Each vCPU is a Intel hyper-thread. As of this writing (July 2020), we see use of Intel Xeon Gold 6140 @ 2.30 GHz with DDR4 memory at 2.6 GHz. Our simple memory speed test showed about 1.8GHz effective throughput to memory.

DO disk : Love / hate relationship!

I love the disk speed – you get good SSD performance with no throttling. Even for attached storage. Unlike other cloud platforms, you don’t have to juggle with figuring out how many IOPS you need, once you understand for that platform how IOPs translates to speed.

To test the disk I use a simple but effective method to test the disk speed. I create a file with /dev/zero using dd of 1GB. dd gives me the write speed. Here is the command I use :

dd if=/dev/zero of=$tempFile bs=1M count=1024 conv=sync oflag=direct
tempFile has the path to a temp file in the mounted disk I am testing

For both direct disk as well as mounted block device we see 200-350 Mbps disk speeds across all droplets our customers use. This is the best we have seen in cloud platforms. Physical hardware can give upto 450Mbps speeds.

So, why the hate?

We have seen disk crashes – thankfully on staging servers. So, when it comes to production servers, we always recommend customers to have a DR plan to minimize loss of data when this happens. Our suspicion is that the storage is not in a managed RAID, hence a disk crash is a droplet specific event.

Network

File transfer speed test

: A large file transfer using scp on the internal network is done in about 130 MB/sec – about a 1 Gb/sec speed.

NFS

NFS of block storage performs poorly. We use nfscache so most reads are served from cache. However, if there is a need for a large number of reads or writes, the performance can drop dramatically.

Examples of NFS hurting performance

Magento 1 : As images are created in the frontend, there is a check to see if an image file exists before an image url is included in a page. This invariably results in slowdown.

Magento 1 and 2 : large log files. Magento stores log files in a shared folder. Multiple lines per hit of logs will result in slowdown.

Experience : We were in the process of taking a Magento 2 website live that had about 2500 errors written to a log file. The issue was related to M1 migration resulting in some attributes not defined in M2. App servers saw 30% CPU in I/O wait and the site came to a crawl. Php access logs showed under 10% CPU utilization.

Non availability of autoscale

DO does not come with an autoscale option (you could get autoscale in their Kubernetes which we are not considering here). This means you may have to keep capacity for a holiday sale for example.

Managing server costs

Server costs even when you shut them down

DO charges for servers that are shut down. If you do not want to be charged fully for a server, storing an image is an option.

Recommendation

We host customers on Digital Ocean if they do not have a need for scaling and are willing to have a DR plan. This generally increases the cost of the overall solution.
Also stores that do not need scaling such as :

PWA – Vue-storefront based stores which use nodejs
A high hit ratio varnish FPC magento store (depends on many factors, but essentially requirement for scaling multiple app servers is less likely)

July 31, 2020 By Pradip Shah hosting, Magento, performance, PWA, scale, Site Speed 0 Comments Read more...

How Magento can get near 0 downtime deployment

Factor III of the 12 Factor App says “Store config in the environment”.

12 Factor App is what devops lives by – a set of 12 principles written by Adam Wiggins for predictable web app deployments.

Storing configuration in environment, separate from code has the advantages of reliable deployment along with reduced time to deploy. It allows separation of the build stage from the deploy stage, with some deploys being just a change in a softlink to the web root folder.

Historical preview : Magento 1

Magento 1 did not have much of a build process – js and css were not versioned, magnification was “online” first access based as was database upgrade information, configuration was stored in the database.

The most reliable way to go from a dev configuration to a live configuration would require a set of known steps that would work or changes directly to the database.

luroConnect developed its own build and deploy process. In our build step we

get source code from git
minify css and js files in the skin and js folders using a grunt based process
set appropriate file ownership and permissions

During the deploy phase, we

Copy app/etc/local.xml from a secure deployment configuration area (our environment)
modify the core config data to add a version string in the skin and js URLs
access the website once through the index.php to cause the update scripts to run

Deploy process is of course run with the site in maintenance – we prefer to do this at the nginx level. Mostly it is a small blip.

Historical preview – pre Magento 2.2

Early Magento 2 builds were similar – except there was some help from the bin/magento command. Our deploy process did not need to version the static access anymore. Plugin enable / disable was given via config.php. Our deployment environment contained env.php.

However, developers had to manually configure and experiment with some options.

Site bringup required devops to access the admin panel or update the database with custom sql – enabling varnish, setting up CDN with a static URL, etc.

Magento 2.2 and beyond

Magento adopted the direction of the 12 factor app and presented in Magento Live UK 2017 a new set of features that would help in ensuring an ability to split the application configuration and environment configuration. Application configuration was defined in app/etc/config.php which is advised to be in git and hosting environment and secure details are kept in env.php which should not be kept in git.

It is a slightly weak conformance – as commented by 12factor app “This is a huge improvement over using constants which are checked into the code repo, but still has weaknesses: it’s easy to mistakenly check in a config file to the repo; there is a tendency for config files to be scattered about in different places and different formats, making it hard to see and manage all the config in one place. Further, these formats tend to be language- or framework-specific.”

Magento has fixed this in 2 ways

The language specific aspect is addressed to some extent in Magento by allowing to use bin/magento cli to edit env.php for sensitive data. The config:sensitive:set directly writes to env.php. These commands no not require the database, hence, can be set in a pre-deploy step.
Use of scoped environment variable names. These would be set in Nginx configuration or an include file such as fastcgi_params.

However, there is no documented way to set database details – except to manually edit the env.php file.

The app:config:dump command

A great help in maintaining a known configuration of the application (which 12factor app suggests be committed to git). This ensures communication between developer to operations.

The app:config:dump command writes to config.php and env.php. While config.php is suggested to be committed to git, env.php should not be committed to git.

If a value is in config.php, the Magento admin panel does not allow the parameter to be edited. This locking helps with giving stability to the application configuration. It ensures the application is developed and tested with a known configuration.

The figure alongside shows the suggested flow.

Suggested flow for using app:config:dump

Why is Magento deployment yet keeping site in maintenance?

However, we find that even after 2 1/2 years of announcement, the acceptance and understanding of these features is weak. Leaving websites in maintenance mode as code is deployed.

Developers are failing to maintain a discipline to own the configuration or devops to understand the application’s build and deploy process.

There are some practical problems as well. An eCommerce manager would like to have control on the live website on say, when backorders would be allowed storewide. Since this is locked in config.php, this request has to go through developers or devops.

luroConnect near 0 downtime deploy

luroConnect’s Magento 2 build is in a pipeline – such as a bitbucket pipeline. A commit triggers the pipeline that does the following

composer install (with the compose cache to speed this process)
bin/magento setup:di:compile
bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

The contents are then tarred and sent to the staging and production servers.

Upon deploy the contents are untared, deployment related files like env.php are copied, media and var are softlinked. The web root softlink is changed to point to this new release. The process is slightly more complicated when multiple autoscale instances are running, as running instances are replaced with ones with new code.

If required the bin/magento setup:upgrade command is run and only then is it required to keep the site in maintenance.

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

May 5, 2020 By Pradip Shah devops, hosting, Magento, Nginx, scale, Site Speed 0 Comments Read more...

12 factor app and Magento

Adam Wiggins’ 12 factor app (https://12factor.net) is a highly respected standard for web apps. While written with SaaS applications in mind, let us explore and see how Magento and the ecosystem stands up to these factors.

1. Codebase. One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys.
Magento is in git and hence a typical Magento project should not have a problem with this.
However, if you use vue-storefront, a popular PWA frontend to Magento, this is broken. Vue-storefront has 2 repos of its own in addition to the Magento repo, all becoming one app.
Another violation happens when a plugin vendor gets ssh access to your live server to fix a plugin issue. Plugin vendors have a serious problem integrating their code into multiple source bases without Magento supporting a versioned plugin architecture out-of-the-box.

2. Dependencies. Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies.
With composer Magento solves this problem.
Violation of plugins is a case in point – many plugins are installed not as composer dependencies. Instead they make it to the merchant repo.

Magento uses php and typical websites are deployed using php-fpm. One may argue that the php-fpm plugins that Magento depends on are not explicitly declared. Leading to the application not working exactly in 2 environments. Another case in point is dependency on php version.

3. Config. Store config in the environment.
12 factor app requires environment variables to be used. Magento has split application and environment configuration between config.php and env.php.
Here is what 12 factor says.
“Another approach to config is the use of config files which are not checked into revision control, such as config/database.yml in Rails. This is a huge improvement over using constants which are checked into the code repo, but still has weaknesses: it’s easy to mistakenly check in a config file to the repo; there is a tendency for config files to be scattered about in different places and different formats, making it hard to see and manage all the config in one place. Further, these formats tend to be language- or framework-specific.”

However, Magento has worked towards this. Specifically, with bin/magento config:set and bin/magento config:sensitive:set commands are a useful way for hosting providers to be 12 factor compliant.

luroConnect has always stored hosting configuration settings separately from the release. Upon deployment of code, the contents of deployment folder are copied. Sometimes they have settings for the application. These include hosting specific as well as sensitive settings. We are moving to using config:set and config:sensitive:set for versions of Magento that support it. We will also move towards storing sensitive variables in secure key stores.

4. Backing services. Treat backing services as attached resources.
“Resources can be attached to and detached from deploys at will.”

While Magento is very good at storing key connections outside the application and database, violations exist in 3^rdparty plugins. To “ease” the deployment most store credentials and connectivity details in the database. Another issue is with SMTP plugins, instead of depending on magento’s default use of localhost and let postfix configuration manage the actual email sending, developers see the convenience of storing this information in the database.

Check out this post on SMTP and postfix configurations.

5. Build, release, run. Separate build and run stages.
Magento has been improving the code deployment process. The setup upgrade is the only command that, if needed, requires the site under maintenance.

6. Processes. Execute the app as one or more stateless processes.
Twelve-factor processes are stateless and share-nothing. Any data that needs to persist must be stored in a stateful backing service, typically a database.

Magento is very good on this count if used with nginx and php-fpm.

7. Port binding. Export services as port binding.
“PHP apps might run as a module inside Apache HTTPD” is flagged as a violation if the apache is also used as a webserver.
nginx + php-fpm gives the best isolation and performance of any stack. Php processes can be independently controlled in a server running php-fpm while nginx can be used for routing and handling web requests, terminating SSL, etc.

8. Concurrency. Scale out via a process model.
Magento is very good at this. Aided by php-fpm process model that complies with the 12 factor app, it is possible to build a cluster to handle only checkout urls for example, with routing handled by an application load balancer such as nginx.

9. Disposability. Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown.
While Magento and php are good at this, some notes are in order.
A reload of php-fpm by default will kill all php processes even though they may be executing a request. Ensuring no new traffic is coming to the php-fpm, and waiting for draining by checking the status for number of active processes (with a timeout ofcourse) will ensure gracefulness in shutdown.
In order to ensure robustness against sudden death of the php-fpm process, it is best to keep the queue length (listen.backlog) to a small number. Turns out managing the queue to scaleout helps in application performance as well.

10. Dev/prod parity. Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible.
The 12 factor app describes 3 gaps – time, personnel and tools. Based on our experience, the personnel gap is eliminated by automation. A commit trigger based automated CI/CD pipeline with an automated deploy to staging and production ensures there is no personnel gap.

A development environment with write access to git can be created with a similar infrastructure to help developers debug issues.

11. Logs. Treat logs as event streams.
Magento allows creation of multiple log files. Modern logging such as monolog allows more control of what is and what isn’t logged. Logs are also generated by nginx, php-fpm and other services used.
Streaming logs for querying and analysis is typically done by your hosting provider.

luroConnect uses fluentd to capture logs. Logs are sent to our Insight service, which analyzes data per minute, hour or day.

12. Admin processes. Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes.
Magento supports cron and rabbitmq based processes. In addition, setup upgrade is also used to change the state of the database during deployment.
However, suggested access to developer for “run arbitrary code or inspect the app’s models against the live database” is not recommended by luroConnect due to security and the risks of the application stability with the state being altered arbitrarily.

April 29, 2020 By Pradip Shah devops, hosting, Magento, Nginx 0 Comments Read more...