Instant Magento Performance Optimization How-to

This week I received a review copy of the book “Instant Magento Performance Optimization How-to”, “Improve the performance of your Magento stores using pratical, hands-on recipes”. The book title sure sounds good since performance is often one of the main issues in any Magento project. The book is relatively compact (only 56 pages) and easy to read. It’s divided in clear subjects that cover a wide range of improvements going from merging css and js files to clustering, database replication and load balancing.

The good parts
One thing I really like about the book is that it offers small hands-on subjects with clear steps to take. It often shows the load time improvement that can be accomplished by implementing the solution so you will know what the benefit will be of a solution.

Although the book is specifically written for Magento projects some of the tips can be applied to any web project. All tips that are offered in the book can already be found on the internet but this book bundles them in a neat way for referencing.

The bad parts
I do think that the author of the book sometimes should warn the reader about drawbacks of a performance tip. For example the part about storing “sessions in the database”. It would be nice if the reader was warned that changing the session storage mechanism on a high traffic webshop would cause a big performance hit on the database and the performance result could be exactly opposite of what is intended to accomplish.

Another thing I really didn’t like was the fact the author advices to chmod the var/logs directory to 0777. This is just a bad practice and should never ever be done.

As a Magento developer I would have liked to see some more in-depth information on some topics but maybe that just isn’t in the scope of the book.

Verdict
The book is nice to read and useful to keep as a reference afterwards. It has some good tips for Magento administrators (beginner to advanced) and can be helpful in solving performance problems. Overall I would recommend buying this book but pay attention to what you are doing and what the possible drawbacks can be of some of the tips that are provided. Consider the book to be a fast reference and introduction to different performance improvements that can be done.

The Packt Publishing can be found here for only €6.79 at the moment.