There’s an opinion that Magento platform is something slow and performs not really well. That’s why a lot of enterprise customers have serious doubt about establishing their online business based on Magento platform. We keep working hard on performance optimization solutions for Community Edition and we’ll post another article with the results we were able to achieve at the moment, but today let me share some numbers related to Enterprise Edition performance.

Everybody knows that one of the most important benefits of Magento Enterprise Edition is that it’s really fast. Much faster than Community version, and we saw how fast it is in the past while we were working with EE . The thing is that we have never tested the platform to determine how exactly fast the EE is. Well, guys, it is unbelievably fast.

How did we test

First of all, I need to stress that we took a home PC to make the test environment. That means that your site will perform even better on professional hosting. But of course you’ll need a dedicated machine for your hosting solution. Again: we are talking about enterprise customers, remember? You need to realize – there’s no way to make millions spending $20 to hosting.

Here’s the hardware specification:

CPU: 3.16 GHz Core 2 Duo E6500
4 Gb DDR2 RAM
SATA 2 HDD drive
OS: 64X Debian 5 Lenny Linux

We ran tests using Siege 2.69 with various number of concurrent users, each making 10 hops based on prepared path list. We judge test as failed once more than 5% of transactions lost.

Default Apache installation

We just installed LAMP and deployed Mangeto versions there. There was no tuning at all.

Nothing unexpected with Community Edition: 100 users test is failed. But take a look how good EE is:

Enterprise edition with 100 users performs better than community edition with 10.

Now, let’s tune the server a little. We have modified Apache preferences and set up PHP APC.

Tuned Apache + APC

And now you can see the real difference. Finally CE was able to handle a hundred. At the same time the gap became really huge. EE has no problems with 200 and moreover 300 users. Good numbers.

Three hundred users: EE still does it for less than a second

Isn’t great? I mean 300 concurrent users is a good target for even a big store. The exact response time for 300 spartans is .72 sec.

So what we have as a bottom line? Performance is not a problem for Enterprise users. It performs pretty good even with a little environment tuning. We actually keep working with optimization for EE, I feel we can definitely achieve less than a half-a-second and more.

And yes, we also have some good numbers with CE, but it’s another story.

Special thanks to Iwan Tarasenko @ Oggetto Labs.