Magento – Improving Speed

Magento has very nice interface, but it seems to me very slow sometime. I wonder if it is because I am in Hong Kong and the server is in US. However, sometime it is really unacceptable slow to me.. so I was trying to figure out how to improve the speed of Magento. One way is to enable mysql query cache, but I find my server’s mysql already turn on the query cache, so it is not the cause. Then I find you can enable compressing data to send to your client, and it seems my Magento store is improved a lot. You may try what I have done to improve your Magento store. 🙂

In order to do this, edit your .htaccess file in Magento Directory:

edit this block (uncomment by removing #):

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

 php_flag zlib.output_compression on

and this (uncomment by removing #):

############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## 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