How to Improve Magento Performance

General Tips

1. Disable Mage_Reports logging for simple page views (use external analytics tools instead)

2. Disable unused (core) modules, e.g. Mage_Poll, Mage_Tag, Mage_Rss, Mage_Wishlist, Mage_XmlConnect, Find_Feed, Mage_Authorizenet

   Pay attention to all side effects, e.g. when deactivating Mage_Wishlist the customer detail view in admin won’t work any longer in CE 1.7
   See also my blog post about disabling the Gift Message extension.

3. Disable Magento file logging in production (or at least set up log rotating)
4. Use one of the latest Magento or OpenMage versions
5. Properly minify your JavaScript and CSS assets
6. Assure Catalog flat index is up-to-date and therewith Magento does not use EAV tables
7. Use one of the newest PHP versions (7.4 or 8.2) because of better memory management
8. Follow the performance tipps by the Magento ECG group

Implement block caching

The concept of block caching should be applied to as many blocks in Magento as possible, like header, footer, navigation bar, product lists, etc.

Cache Helper Tools

Using caching in your local development environment can cause quite a lot of headache. Basically most of the changes in .phtml files or configuration sections require you to flush the Magento cache.

While the great n98-magerun tool already simplifies the cache flush with the command n98-magerun cache:flush it is still one step too much.

That's where this small snippet can help you. It watches for file changes in the Magento design folder and in case of a change it triggers the flush of the Magento block cache and full page cache optionally:

fswatch -ot htdocs/app/design/frontend/default/vianetz | xargs -n1 -I{} n98-magerun cache:clean block_html fpc