Urgh. It has been several years now since I last had to deal with Magento, and nothing I've seen over the years suggests it has got any better.

At the time, the final product was arguably a case of code that is far too split up, resulting in quite some system penalties. I get the advantage of developing that way, but I wonder if they'd have been served better by somehow writing stuff to combine libraries together for the final releases product.

Even loading the landing page on a default website used to require loading hundreds of PHP scripts. I was absolutely gobsmacked the metrics I was getting out of APC.