PHPro improving Magento 1 category pages and cron jobs performance

By Christophe Dujarric, on Jan 18, 2017

PHPro is a Blackfire Silver Partner. They develop Enterprise PHP solutions on various frameworks, including Magento, Drupal and Symfony. Thomas Brankaer recently took a run on improving a Magento store’s performance, with the help of Blackfire. He found two major performance optimizations.

On category pages, rewriting the getSortedAttributes function got him to improve the whole page’s wall clock time by 45%. Category pages being the most requested pages in the whole framework, each performance improvement results in a better user experience when navigating through the products catalog. That improvement was key in delivering a better store for that use case.

The second improvement was on Magento’s cron jobs importing product images. He figured that on that store, an ‘out of memory’ error was thrown. Blackfire helped him find the root cause in the Varien_Image_adapter_Gd2 class, which was never emptying the memory from already imported images. Overriding that class from the Magento 1 lib directory helped hm to achieve a -83% memory usage.

Read the full article and discover how Thomas solved the issues on PHPro’s blog!

Happy Magento store optimization!

Christophe Dujarric

Christophe is the Chief Product Officer at Blackfire. He's an engineer, but probably one of the least "tech" people in the company. He's wearing many hats, from product management to marketing and sales. He loves the beauty of simple solutions that solve actual problems.