Boost the speed of your Magento

30th JUN 2008 | Posted by in Magento, Programming
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One of the drawbacks of Magento is currently its speed if default configuration is used. There are certain ways of making it run faster. The best one is to enable GZip compression by changing .htaccess file a little. You just need to uncomment part of the code. In my case, the speed increase was exactly 235%. Let’s start speeding up Magento!

Find the following lines in your Magento .htaccess file and replace them with the following code.

############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip

# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

# Netscape 4.x has some problems…
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don’t compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don’t deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

# enable resulting html compression
php_flag zlib.output_compression on

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Author

Tomislav Bilic

CEO

Tomislav is an owner and CEO of Inchoo. Enjoys traveling, traditional cuisine (from most cultures), good wine and strong rakija.

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Discussion 118 Comments

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  1. Casper Bakker
    01-08-2008 at 14:53 | #

    Wow, amazing how much this changes. It’s actually pretty fast now.

    Thanks for the advice!

    Cheerz, Casper.

  2. Vladimir
    04-08-2008 at 19:25 | #

    You can also play with DeflateBufferSize and DeflateCompressionLevel settings. But don’t make DeflateCompressionLevel too high, though

  3. Tomislav Bilic
    12-08-2008 at 7:41 | #

    Thanks Vladimir,

    Can you please present the examples of such usage?

  4. Vladimir
    12-08-2008 at 14:04 | #

    I did it this way (this is a part of <VirtualHost> declaration):

    <IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    DeflateBufferSize 32768
    DeflateCompressionLevel 5

    <Location />
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|tiff)$ no-gzip dont-vary
    Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
    </Location>
    </IfModule>

  5. Tomislav Bilic
    12-08-2008 at 14:51 | #

    Thank you :)

  6. Andrés
    22-08-2008 at 15:34 | #

    Hi!
    is this valid for *any* webhosting?

    thanks.
    -andres

  7. Tomislav Bilic
    25-08-2008 at 21:11 | #

    Hi Andrés,
    Most of the things don’t always work on all hostings. For example, I’m sure Vladimir’s suggestion is ok, but that doesn’t work on mine.

  8. Jake Rutter
    12-09-2008 at 22:12 | #

    Wow this works really well, thanks for the advice!

  9. Jonathan
    18-09-2008 at 14:19 | #

    Amazing! Thank you!

  10. AC-k3v
    22-09-2008 at 5:08 | #

    my htaccess file already looks like that. i just d-loaded two days ago. am i missing something?

  11. Lataz
    28-09-2008 at 3:31 | #

    When I try this on Mosso clustered hosting I get a 500 Internal Server error

  12. jc
    29-09-2008 at 4:06 | #

    i just tried using magento, but it’s way slow. where can i get the .htaccess file? the one i got off my server only has 3 lines in it about “order deny, allow Deny from all”

    this isn’t the right file is it?

  13. Zeljko Prsa
    29-09-2008 at 21:46 | #

    Thanks, fortunately it did help making magento run three times faster :)

  14. Adam
    26-10-2008 at 10:50 | #

    Made a huge difference unreal

  15. Colin
    28-10-2008 at 20:16 | #

    What a difference far faster, i’m not 100% sure but this htaccess setup should work on any website!

    AC-k3v, yes Magento v 1.1.6 has the coding in the htacess, however it is in a comment block and needs editing out.

  16. Roby
    07-11-2008 at 12:39 | #

    It depend if Apache is 1.3 or 2.0. I have Apache 1.3 and i have to use mod_gzip setting in htaccess:

    mod_gzip_on Yes

  17. XPC Design
    12-11-2008 at 20:06 | #

    Someone posted a comment to my post (that refers to your solution) mentioning there’s another line of code that needs to be uncommented otherwise I don’t think these changes work.

    ############################################
    ## enable resulting html compression

    php_flag zlib.output_compression on

  18. Marc Falk
    16-12-2008 at 15:11 | #

    Thanks man! Works Great!

  19. Ben
    16-12-2008 at 22:15 | #

    Fantastic! – Good call on uncommenting the zlib flag, XPC.

  20. ~aldo
    18-12-2008 at 23:16 | #

    Id didn’t work for me, should it start working as soon as you modify the .htaccess? Did I miss another step?

  21. ana
    21-12-2008 at 7:20 | #

    thanks so much!!!!! it truly works much more faster than before!

  22. Tomislav Bilic
    21-12-2008 at 12:04 | #

    @Aldo
    Yes, it should start when you modify .htaccess file. If it doesn’t work, there could be several reasons, probably related to server configuration. Also, take a look at the comment from XPC Design to see if it helps.
    Many thanks.

  23. Stavros
    28-01-2009 at 18:40 | #

    thanks for the info Bilic…

    is this compatible with magento-1.2.0.3, also?

  24. Marco
    28-01-2009 at 21:28 | #

    GREAT JOB
    ……yes it works with 1.2.0.3

  25. Mark
    07-02-2009 at 4:15 | #

    Can someone cut and paste their htaccess file? Mine keeps giving me a 500 Internal Server Error when I add Vladimr’s suggestions

  26. cradossk
    10-02-2009 at 14:10 | #

    @Mark:
    Commenting this out solved the 500 here:

    # Make sure proxies don’t deliver the wrong content
    # Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

  27. Jason
    07-04-2009 at 3:13 | #

    Nice maybe I’ll start my own “fast” $20-$50 / month web hosting company with this, it improved my speed by at least 10,000% on a $3 / month web host….no joke

  28. Neo
    07-04-2009 at 15:06 | #

    I did as the above instruction but no success. the site’s speed seems not changed anymore. I use magento 1.3.0

  29. Adult Sex Toys
    08-04-2009 at 14:54 | #

    Great tip. Thanks!

  30. davidd
    02-06-2009 at 21:18 | #

    didn’t help my site out.
    Magento 1.3.2.1
    hosted at Crucial Webhosting on a split-shared container.

  31. Major
    20-06-2009 at 16:50 | #

    Just did this on my dedicated linux vm @ GoDaddy and my time to first byte went from ~40sec to 1.5sec-6sec.

    HUGE IMPROVEMENT!! THANK YOU!!

  32. Neale
    29-06-2009 at 22:06 | #

    Worked fine for me thanks a lot

  33. dueto
    16-07-2009 at 16:32 | #

    Very helpful,very good!

  34. jayu
    10-09-2009 at 7:51 | #

    Nice one !! And thanks for your guidance.

  35. Webhostuk LTD
    12-09-2009 at 4:14 | #

    Thank you for this nice and helpful article.

  36. Pingback: Boost the performance of your magento installation | Magento News

  37. jsteb
    22-09-2009 at 4:26 | #

    way faster… it took several page loads to see the difference, but it is much better now. thanks!

  38. PLR Mart
    03-10-2009 at 6:17 | #

    i tried many examples. But couldn’t able to find the correct solution to make the magento site speedup.

    Check my website at http://www.theplrmart.com which is running slowly.

    can anyone kindly help me out in getting the site fast please

    Regards
    Venkat

  39. Fred
    20-10-2009 at 16:06 | #

    Hi PLR Mart

    I got exactly the same problem. Seems to stall during the initializiation.

    Have you enable the profiler to see where it hangs in your case?

    Regards
    Fred

  40. jackson
    28-10-2009 at 14:25 | #

    This works. thank you

  41. Cole
    25-11-2009 at 9:15 | #

    I added this to my install, tried all the different uncomments, and I still receive a Internal Server Error (500). The only way I’ve been able to get this to go away is to uncomment

    # enable resulting html compression
    php_flag zlib.output_compression on

    Which I’m sure is needed….
    Any input??

  42. Andy Bird
    12-12-2009 at 9:55 | #

    This is a great site.. thanks for providing all these lovely hints and tips… this one reminded me that i forget to set compression on one of my sites. doh!

    the other 2 big things that made a difference for me was the installation of xcache and adding /var/cache to tmpfs

    doing a apache benchmark 3000 times on the site after adding xcache to 1.8 seconds a drop from 11.3ish

    hope this helps

  43. Laptop Keyboards
    15-12-2009 at 12:03 | #

    Thanks for the tutorial its made a big difference as far as I can tell. I would like to double test it via some type of website speed checker though just to be sure. Could any one recommend a good one?

  44. Andy Bird
    15-12-2009 at 12:49 | #

    I use this one

    http://www.freespeedtest.com/

    gives a general idea of speeds from different parts of the world. or if you are offering hosting you could look at http://magebenchmark.sonassi.com/

  45. Laptop Keyboards
    15-12-2009 at 14:05 | #

    Thanks Andy for your help, cheers

  46. Rosco
    06-01-2010 at 0:41 | #

    Wow!!! I tested my sites speed at http://www.freespeedtest.com before I did the .htaccess update:

    Before: 16.34 seconds
    After: 2.27 seconds

    Amazing thanks!!!

  47. Christopher
    09-01-2010 at 20:42 | #

    Wow! Magneto pages are now loading in less than a second! See http://www.itsournature.com/

  48. yeexi
    10-01-2010 at 17:00 | #

    Very helpful, i’m hosting site on godaddy Deluxe linux hosting.

  49. SickPuppy
    13-01-2010 at 8:31 | #

    Can someone take a look at my htaccess and tell me how to make the seed mods to it. everytime I try I get the 500 Internal Server error

    Thanks

    ############################################
    ## uncomment these lines for CGI mode
    ## make sure to specify the correct cgi php binary file name
    ## it might be /cgi-bin/php-cgi
    # Action php5-cgi /cgi-bin/php5-cgi
    # AddHandler php5-cgi .php
    ############################################
    ## GoDaddy specific options
    # Options -MultiViews
    ## you might also need to add this line to php.ini
    ## cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
    ## if it still doesn’t work, rename php.ini to php5.ini
    ############################################
    ## this line is specific for 1and1 hosting
    #AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
    #AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php
    ############################################
    ## default index file
    DirectoryIndex index.php
    ## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip
    # Insert filter on all content
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    # Insert filter on selected content types only
    #AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript
    # Netscape 4.x has some problems…
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
    # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    # Don’t compress images
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
    # Make sure proxies don’t deliver the wrong content
    Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
    ############################################
    ## enable rewrites
    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine on
    ############################################
    ## you can put here your magento root folder
    ## path relative to web root
    #RewriteBase /magento/
    ############################################
    ## workaround for HTTP authorization
    ## in CGI environment
    RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
    ############################################
    ## always send 404 on missing files in these folders
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(media|skin|js)/
    ############################################
    ## never rewrite for existing files, directories and links
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
    ############################################
    ## rewrite everything else to index.php
    RewriteRule .* index.php [L]
    </IfModule>

    ############################################
    ## Prevent character encoding issues from server overrides
    ## If you still have problems, use the second line instead
    # AddDefaultCharset Off
    #AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
    <IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ############################################
    ## Add default Expires header
    ## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#expires
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
    </IfModule>
    ############################################
    ## By default allow all access
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    ############################################
    ## If running in cluster environment, uncomment this
    ## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#etags
    #FileETag none

  50. hanky
    15-02-2010 at 11:48 | #

    please alabore what lines should be changed in htaccess file

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