Is Magento for eCommerce Scalable?
My recent experience with Magento brings a doubt: is Magento Scalable? I am finalizing a plugin that will allow catalog synchronization with a POS system. Some stores have over 10,000 products, skus to be accurate. I have extended the core classes to accommodate for the product import with certain attributes and was shocked to discover that for each new product saved, or in code terms, each $product->save() it was hammering the DB with approximately 1,000 queries. That also meant that importing 1,000 products took approximately 3-5 minutes on a powerful server which included 15K SCSI hard drives.
Writing directly to the database is not an option because it will potentially introduce a problem with any upgrade efforts and in general is not recommended. There is a limit to how much hardware is being thrown at Magento in order to cover for any performance imperfections. Additionally, almost any interaction with the Magento support team results in lists of mysql configuration best practices which are already in place. Magento: you can run but you cannot hide! Perhaps you cannot run either.
The bottom line is that I am positive that there is a solution, and I am 100% convinced that the Magento developers are working on a solution as I write this blog. It is only in the meantime that it is painful to see all these great sites serving ‘gummy’ pages and developers asking how to add the ‘Please wait while loading’ AJAX loader to the front end of the store…
