ZendServer and Magento

I had awaited the Zend Server webinar on Magento performance for a good few weeks and could honestly say that the geek in me was looking forward to it. After reading an interesting article by Philippe Humeau, NBS System – my interested was peaked by the promise of better performance using ZendServer.

The two flavours available are ZendServer CE – the freely available community edition and ZendServer – the licence only enterprise edition.

So Thursday evening was started by the project leader of Magento who was joined by several staff from Zend, who over the next hour would reveal their performance to the world. Initial thoughts from the publication drafted by Humeau would convince anyone to drop their mod_PHP build and instantly adopt ZendServer, but the presentation started to make me think otherwise.

What is ZendServer then

ZendServer is a direct replacement for your mod_PHP Apache module, easily installed using aptitude or yum. It runs essentially as a wrapper for Apache, Nginx or Lighttpd and interprets all PHP functionality.

So the webinar then …

Well, to be honest, I was expecting more; more detail; more figures; more revelations; the only thing I wanted less of, was fluff. It was like any other marketing white paper – it showed ZendServer as being the clear winner for performance. But looking at their test bed, a single dedicated server, with 1 concurrent user during testing and very little detail on hardware (even when probed). They revealed the performance benefits over standard Apache/mod_PHP using ZendServer, but the lengths involved make it slightly impractical for use in a multi user environment. I certainly know, that I wouldn’t feel happy having to manage hundreds of caching rules manually, but for a single dedicated unit running a single store – I can see the virtues. I’m hoping in due time Varien will find a way to automatically integrate caching rules so it doesn’t need to be monitored manually as it simply isn’t a viable option.

Regarding optimisation techniques, they addressed nothing that any Magento developer wasn’t already familiar with, caching, flat catalogue and the beta compiler. He did mention they were using Memcache as the store cache but didn’t delve into any configuration details.

All in all, it felt like more of a sales pitch than a presentation of Magento performance with ZendServer – it lacked the technical detail and intimacy of real testing. Perhaps in due time we will begin to see published figures showing decent levels of concurrency with full information about the test environment.

I think I’ll remain ‘open-minded’ for now before shelling out on a ZendServer licence.

What did make me laugh was during the Q&A section, an attendee posed the question – “How can I sustain 40 RPS with Magento”. The solution? 3 frontend ZendServer/Apache quad core, 8GB RAM each with a sole dedicated MySQL server. Maybe as a host I’m somewhat mislead, but we can achieve the above result from a single frontend server running standard Apache/mod_PHP.