Does anyone use Magento in production? | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone use Magento in production?

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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.

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?

The largest company in our sector, Harbor Freight, appear to be running Magento at scale ok.

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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... 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

[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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Got any suggestions as to alternatives?

I hear WooCommerce is good ;)

Opencart is very lightweight in my experience.

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

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

toms.com uses it.

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