euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

Apache2’s mod_deflate offers further efficiencies in the front-end page-performance of OXID eShops.  It uses the GZIP compression format, by which the server compresses the resource to be transmitted and the client/browser decompresses the same before presentation on screen.

To be measured are performance parameters of time and file-size.  We used the Google Developer Tools to make the following time measurements.

The measurements taken were the following resources:

• HTML Document
• Cascading Stylesheet Files
  • style.css
  • oxid.css
  • jquery.jcarousel.css
• Javascript Script Files
  • oxid.js
  • jquery.min.js
  • jquery.jcarousel.js
  • ga.js

Time Measurements for OXID eShop Resources using mod_deflate

In order to interpret this data it is important to understand the different columns in the table.  The “post” time values in Send and Revieve columns, from after mod_deflate was used in comparision with the “pre” values indeed are lower.  Nevertheless there are some cases where the values are indeed higher.

We will be making further performance measurements in the next days, not only the time-values but also the file-sizes and report them shortly here.

We look forward to your feedback and observations – or “Leave a Reply” below!

If you are constantly bewildered as to which browser your OXID eShop should support, you can use the nifty Statscounter Tool for getting the most current browser-usage statistics.

The below graph shows the splits of major browser-brands (taken for Germany for the months January to November 2011.

Particularly interesting is the falling share of Firefox (52.54% in Nov. 2011) and the rising share of Google Chrome (12.44% in Nov. 2011, up from ~8% at beginning of 2011).

This affirms that OXID Shop programmers factor in the functionality of the shops in at least 3 browsers, with 15% or higher market-share. Often requested by shop-merchants is Safari compatibility, of course both on MAC and Windows.

Very much in trend is also compatibility with the iPAD (Safari) browser, although we have noticed significant deviations of iPAD-Safari from the HTML standards (which keep getting fixed in newer versions of iOS).

If you are a shop-merchant, or shop-programmer, we’d love to hear about your browser-challenges and how you are overcoming them! Please drop us a comment..

This article is a continuation of Improving Performance of OXID Shops – Part 01

A configuration variable can be introduced into config.inc.php for specifying a URL for specifying an alternative location for images and other static media files like site-videos, flash-content or downloadable PDF etc.

$this->sAltImageDir = 'http://www.myshop.de:801/';

In our example, this particular location, is where our /out/pictures/ folder is mapped to. An NGINX server listens on port 801.

In this example we used the same server for hosting the Apache application-server (AAS) as well as the NGINX content-server (NCS) on the same server-instance.

The following sections contain a detailed account of how NGINX can be configured on a Debian Lenny/5.0 server.

NGINX on Debain 5.0/Lenny for OXID eShops

Debian/5.0 ships with Version 0.6.x of NGINX (latest from nginx.org is version 0.8.x), which works just well for our purpose.

NGINX configuration files and organization in the /etc/ folder is similar to that of Apache2.  Individual sites and Virtualhost(s) (or simply called server(s) in NGINX jargon) can be configured in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default.   The configuration block for our tests simply looks like:

server {
     listen   801;
     server_name  www.myshop.de;
     access_log  /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log;

  location / {
     root   /home/myshop/www/out/pictures/;
     index  index.html index.htm;
}

Obviously, here www.myshop.de is the URL of your shop, files for which load from/home/myshop/www/ ($SHOP) and the pictures load from $SHOP/out/pictures.

Processes

The process list on the web-server instance looks as follows:

vm0:~# ps ax | grep -E "apache|nginx"
 1889 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 1905 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 1906 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 1907 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 1908 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 1909 ?        S      0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
 2058 pts/0    S+     0:00 grep apache
 1756 ?        Ss     0:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx
 1757 ?        S      0:00 nginx: worker process
 2060 pts/0    S+     0:00 grep nginx

For optimizing performance your OXID eShop or getting a new one developed, please contact euroblaze at +49-711-7947-2394 or oxid@euroblaze.de.

When creating B2C e-Commerce Shops, it is important to provide a high performance of online-shops.  For one thing it is important to keep an online-shop fast so that they are able to “quickly take care of business” and hence better the conversion rate.  For the other it is important to plan sufficient capacity so the the number of users/buyers can scale, even so in high-peak seasons.

The classical LAMP installation, though powerful in it’s server-side processing capabilities and features, is usually not the fastest server solution for certain types of data such as static media content such as images and videos.  Due to this OXID shops hosted on LAMP, while relying on Apache2/PHP5 and MySQL’s robust features, can benefit significantly in speed by relying on a high-performance static-content servers, such as NGINX.

There are several server configurations possible:

1. Apache and NGINX running on the same machine, the former hosting the OXID eSales application and the latter hosting only the related static content.
2. Apache running on an application server (AS) machine and NGINX serving static content (CS, Content-Server) from a separate machine.
3. Apache running on an application server, and NGINX service content from a network of content servers – a classical Content Delivery Network (CDN)

This series of articles explains how to setup OXID eSales shops in the 3 above configurations.

• NGINX for OXID eShop Images and Media Files – Part 02

Inspiration & Resources

Inspiration for this solution was taken from the following resources:

• Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site – Yahoo Developer Network
• High Performance Web Sites: Rule 2 – Use a Content Delivery Network – Yahoo Developer Network
• OXID mit Vollgas – Henrik Steffen, Top Concepts GmbH (in German)

If you are using special zoom-tools like Magic Zoom, you may have to make modifications to the integration module with OXID, so that the tool uses appropriate high-performance URL for loading media-content.