Magento is a powerful popular Open Source eCommerce platform that merchants can use to build and run their online stores.
All that flexibility comes with a price. Magento sites are difficult to scale and suffer from severe performance degradation under load. The good news is that with some simple configuration aiCache can increase the performance of a Magento implementation by 10X without changing code. You can easily provide this benefit at your hosting site or by front ending Magento using aiCache on the Amazon Web Services network.
We wanted to make it as simple as possible. We have pre-made Magento configurations and we provide two free hours of installation and optimization support.
There are three main issues to scaling Magento. The first issue is managing network sessions from large numbers of concurrent users. In standard architecture a thread or process is opened to support each simultaneous connection. With a few hundred users connected, passively browsing, the number of connections begins to swamp system resources. Second, the amount of time to generate pages begins to suffer dramatically with each additional request, as Magento must go to the database, application and web server each time to re-generate content. Finally with dynamic data such as product searches, Magento must continually re-generate the same page to make sure updates are instantly reflected. A process that simply does not scale.
aiCache solves the first issue by completely removing session management from the Magento server. aiCache front ends all client communications via its right-threaded non-blocking, multiplexed IO design, nerd speak to some but this architecture allows virtually unlimited numbers of connected clients.
Second, aiCache intercepts all client requests using it flexible caching configuration and serves 99% of requests directly from RAM, without hitting the internal infrastructure.
aiCache relies on caching to achieve this performance so you might naturally ask what about the items unique to the user such as their cart. We handle this with simple exclusions to the caching rules. All user unique data is passed through and persists through the session management. You leave your core environment doing the things you want, like delivering orders, aiCache does the rest.
aiCache saves the day We run 30 or so quad extra large boxes in EC2. When our dedicated load balancer gave way to inbound traffic, we approached aiCache to assist us. They deployed aiCache literally within minutes. We have discovered that it does wonders with caching and has allowed us to remove half the nodes from our app server setup already. Thanks aiCache. -Echo Media
Easiest caching server we've found We were looking for something to help keep as much load as possible off our Windows origin servers. Our website is subject to extreme spikes in traffic, and there are make requests that can be cached. We've now used aiCache during several large events, and the CPU is hardly pressed at all. The support from aiCache had been excellent. They were able to create a new feature for us in under 24 hours. -ScribbleLive.com
