Extremely worried about Magento performance

Question

I currently have 1 magento app running 3 different stores:

• BelExpress
• Medical em Casa
• Medical Express (this one is still under construction)

The database for this store is 370MB in size. The stores share 9.000 SKU's and they have 1k to 2k grouped products (that associate the SKU's) each.

Running the apache AB benchmark tool, I get as low as 0.29 requests per second, which I reckon is a very very low number even for a magento store.

The biggest worry though, is the backend. There are currently 5 people updating and inserting new products through the backend and it's taking as long as 4 minutes to update/insert ONE product. That's a massive waste of time, and I can't for the life of me explain it.

Here are my server's resources:

• Processor: AMD Athlon X2 3400+ (2x 1.8Ghz)
• Memory: 4GB
• Disks: 2x 500Gb

I'm running Debian Lenny Apache 2.0, PHP Version 5.2.6-1+lenny16 with eAccelerator and Memcahed. (you can check all the info here)

And here are my config files for Apache, MySQL and PHP.

• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP

I'm not a server admin (although I'm responsible for all the websites and server itself), so this is not my "beach" so to speak. My question is, is this the way it's supposed to work with my current resources, or am I missing something important in my configuration?

I realize this may seem like I'm looking for "hand helding" but that's not my intention. I'm simply tired of trying new stuff over and over and I just can't seem to make it run smoothly.

Answer 1

The straightforward answer is: the server is underpowered. No matter how you configure this, you will need to upgrade for an environment more suited to Magento.

Source: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+64+X2+Dual+Core+3400%2B

Mind you though, the CPUs listed above are very high-end CPUs with about 10 times the processing power compared to the AMD dual-core chip. My laptop CPU which is an Intel Core i7 2.2GHz quad-core benchmarks at around 5,000. I would recommend that you go for a CPU above 5,000 from the list found here.

16GB RAM and an SSD would also seem sensible/reasonable given that it does not cost much these days.

Answer 2

Your cache size is way too low for a site like Magento. I run a similar site, and we have 256mb of cache. With 16mb you're going to be running into caching dumps constantly.

Your server resources are fine for the load you have, assuming nothing else huge is running next to Magento. It's a hog, but it's not that bad and 4gb of RAM is more than enough.

I would temporarily disable your cache and see if that improves anything. I'd also recommend that you look through the store configuration in Magento because you may not have the best caching configuration - Magento's caching setup is complex and opaque.