Sportsfanoutlet.com
Slow speeds, slow indexing.

The Problem

This Magento Community website was hosted on a dedicated server, but was suffering from poor I/O and MySQL queries that were taking too long.

The client was waiting over an hour for a Magento reindex to complete, during which time site performance was impacted. Their page load times were in the bottom 25% of their peer group, even with a full page cache module.

Their MySQL database was around 5 GB in size, with many tables containing millions of rows.

What LexiConn Provided

We provided Sportsfanoutlet.com with a managed dedicated server, utilizing hardware RAID-10 with write-back caching enabled (protected by a battery backup unit). The server was given ample amounts of RAM, and was using a high end 8-core CPU.

APC caching was implemented and tweaked for performance. MySQL query caching was optimized, and MySQL settings were updated to take full advantage of the server.

The database was analyzed, as well as proper cronjob execution and log rotation.

The Result

We were able to get the reindexing process down from over an hour to under 7 minutes. During reindexing, no noticeable degradation could be seen on the website.

MySQL queries were all finishing quickly, which made all admin functions run smoothly.

Page load times went from the bottom 25% to the top 25% of their peer group with these changes.

The database was cleaned up significantly, shrinking the size to under 2 GB, and reducing tables from millions of rows to much more manageable levels. This improved performance and reduced memory requirements for MySQL.

We were able to take a poorly performing dedicated server environment for Magento, and transform it into a solution that sped up the website considerably, made reindexing complete quickly, and provided room for growth and expansion without sacrificing performance.