30 Jan

Magento MySQL Replication

We've got a fairly vast experience of MySQL clusters - and Percona have worked with us on a number of occasions when pushing the boundaries of complex configurations. Can Magento natively handle read-only slaves Magento is natively capable of splitting off reads/writes to different database servers (with the exception of a few broken releases, eg. … Continue reading

21 Dec

Its that time of year again, we're closed for Christmas

Another year has passed and we'll soon be saying the end to 2012 and hello to 2013 - but you'll have to do it without us, well, at least until we re-open on January 7th 2013. Our Manchester office will be shut from 21st December 2012 until 7th January 2013. Team members will still be … Continue reading

28 Jul

Quicker Dumping of a Magento MySQL Database for Branching

Any experienced Magento developer will certainly have felt the pain of dumping a multi-gigabyte MySQL database for a Magento store. Which is certainly a tedious process when you want to make a quick branch or rapidly update your staging environment. We're big advocates of branch often and merge often - but this also means updating … Continue reading

28 Jul

Quickly Purge a Magento MySQL Database

I'm sure everyone has got to that point where they need to empty a Magento MySQL database and you've logged into PHPMyAdmin, selected all the tables, then clicked delete. Only to find out only a small proportion can be deleted because of foreign key constraints. But if you persist, running the "select all" and "drop" … Continue reading

19 Jul

Magento Enterprise Theme Fallback

If you are adopting a minimal-is-best approach to templating your Magento Enterprise store (ie. local.xml method), you'll soon run into some odd behaviour with the theme fallback. Typically, a Magento store will try to load a file in the following order ./app/design/frontend/custom_package/custom_theme ./app/design/frontend/custom_package/default ./app/design/frontend/base/default However, if you are using Magento Enterprise and which to use … Continue reading

12 Jul

Why Siege isn't an accurate test tool for Magento performance

We're getting pretty concerned at Sonassi HQ with the growing confusion surrounding transactions per second (TPS), requests per second (RPS) and concurrency by the community as a whole. Shamefully, I fear that we are guilty for bucking this trend. We created a monster, now its time to put it down 3 years ago, when we … Continue reading

6 Jul

Important Magento Security Update – Zend Platform Vulnerability

We have recently learned of a serious vulnerability in the Zend platform on which Magento is built. This note provides information on how customers can access and install a patch that addresses this issue. The Issue The vulnerability potentially allows an attacker to read any file on the web server where the Zend XMLRPC functionality … Continue reading