Magento 2 vs Magento 1: A Comparison and Review (Part 2)

August 8, 2016March 8, 2017 Mahmoud Tantawy 1 Comment

In part 1, we started a comparison between Magento 2 and Magento 1 in order to list what’s new in Magento 2, while comparing it to Magento 1 to put things into perspective.

We compared themes and extensions development, frontend development, and admin dashboard.In this sequel, we will explore more into the features, performance, stability, and deployment process.

Features

Magento 2 has all the features included in Magento 1, yet adds upon it many new features like:

CSS Preprocessing
Better Security
PayPal integration enhancements
More payment methods based on BrainTree
Full-Page Cache (FPC), now available for Community edition as well.
Performance, or lackthereof as we will discuss later.

Magento 2 is not an upgrade from Magento 1; it is more of a re-write so while it introduces some new features, more effort is put into Magento’s Core as we inspected earlier, so the lack of impressive new features is justified as long as no features were removed and hopefully with time new features will be added after stabilizing the product.

Performance

Releasing a re-write version of a software without adding new features is justifiable and actually expected for the first couple of releases until bugs are squashed and everything is stabilized.

However, releasing a new version of a software like Magento 2 with clear performance issues, where performance has been/is a crucial cornerstone of the software, is never acceptable and is a clear sign that the maturity of the software is badly affected.

Although the different articles list performance enhancements as a feature of Magento 2, we do realize from the experience of working with both Magento products that this is not true and, most probably, this is all just theoretical speculations.

It takes only seconds after installing Magento 2 to realize the following:

Magento 2 is more CPU hungry than Magento 1.
Magento 2 requires more housekeeping than Magento 1
Running Magento 2 in “developer” mode, which is essential during development phase, means you have to wait minutes between page loads, and you won’t even be able to spend that time doing something else as Magento will make sure to leave no resources whatsoever for your computer to be able to perform other actions in parallel.
Magento 2 is slow, like really slow, unbearably slow, not even comparable to Magento 1; we expected Magento 2 to be at least on par with Magento 1; however, this is not true, performance is much worse and pages load much slower and use much more resources.
Even in “developer” mode, which should mean that all caching is turned off, Magento 2 still utilizes some caching mechanisms to be able to perform in an acceptable manner. You have to run `setup:static-content:deploy` to deploy static content like assets, and Magento automatically caches “Dependency Injection” in var/di directory, which causes frustrations and slows down development.

These disappointments were confirmed by the various benchmarks published by other developers, as well as comments by the developers on the different forums.

Almost all benchmarks indicated that while Magento 2 uses more CPU resources than Magento 1, it is also twice as slow as Magento 1, meaning that it can serve only half the number of requests that Magento 1 can serve in the same time, all while using more CPU resources.

These benchmarks were confirmed even with caching turned on, so while Magento 2 offers Full-Page Cache (FPC) for both enterprise and community editions (Magento 1 offered FPC only for enterprise edition), and also offers integration with Varnish out-of-the-box, it is still slower even when utilizing the different caching techniques.

A detailed benchmark can be found at https://www.magecore.com/blog/news/magento-ce-1-9-vs-magento-ce-2-0-performance-comparison “Magento CE 1.9 vs Magento CE 2.0 Performance Comparison”, written by “Dima Soroka” who is the former lead Architect of the Magento project and wrote on the official blog for “MageCore” who are certified Magento Partners.

While Magento 2 supports PHP7 which normally reduces processing time by almost 50%, Magento 2 is still slower than Magento 1; however, utilizing PHP7 makes Magento 2 a bit faster and decreases the gap between Magento 2 and Magento 1.

Here is a detailed benchmark by Dima Soroka as well, https://www.magecore.com/blog/news/php-7-affects-performance-magento-1-9-ce-vs-magento-2-0-ce “How Does PHP 7 Affects Performance of Magento 1.9 CE vs. Magento 2.0 CE”

Magento 2 tries to offer better performance by offering the following tools, which while helping a lot it also adds a lot to the complexity:

Compiling of PHP files.
Merging of global assets
Indexing
Full-Page Cache
Caching of “Dependency Injection”
Caching various other items like configurations and layout

We hope that Magento team will focus on optimizing performance so that Magento 2 at least matches the performance of Magento 1 in the near future.

Stability

It is expected that a major software like Magento doesn’t go live unless bugs are squashed and proper testing is conducted; unfortunately, this was not the case in our experience.

A quick visit to Magento 2 code repository on GitHub at https://github.com/magento/magento2 reveals the amount of issues opened. We have also faced many issues ourselves although we have always used the latest stable release of Magento 2.

Some issues were critical, like the issues affecting the cache and the translations, others we have attempted to make temporary fixes for ourselves, but all in all, our developers have always been surprised by the bad quality of the code in areas with bugs.

Have a look at the release notes for the latest version of Magento 2.1 at http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.1/release-notes/ReleaseNotes2.1.0EE.html. Notice the amount of issues fixed and the known issues not fixed yet. This is obviously not an enterprise-edition software.

It is worth-mentioning that upgrading from Magento to version 2.1 was a complete failure for us; we even had to roll back to a backup of version 2.0.7 after 48 hours of downtime and different trials to fix Magento issues ourselves.

One issue was with the default Magento theme, which we built upon a customized theme. Here is an answer from Stack OverFlow pointing out the bug in the theme “Luma”, along with comments by developers who suffer from Magento 2 instability.

Deployment Process

In today’s software development world, deployment should be fully automated; it is no longer accepted to have a person dedicated to deployments, or even downtime caused by deploying a newer version of a software.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) aim at decreasing the effort and time required to push new features, enhancements, and fixes by the developers to production servers by automating the process.

Different softwares and frameworks are built with CI and CD in mind; tools and scripts are developed to make sure deployments are safe, automated, and fast.

We have easily established an automated deployment process for Magento 1 on production servers; the process simplified is the following:

Push release to code repository.
Automatically trigger a script on production servers.
Pull the updated files.
Run modman to make sure new files are correctly linked.
Clear the cache.

What’s beautiful about this process is, beside the simplicity, it takes couple of minutes and doesn’t cause downtimes, unless the code itself caused issues which should be detected by CI when running the automated tests.

We tried to devise a similar process for Magento 2, after many iterations we figured out a long process that looks something along the lines of:

Push release to code repository.
Automatically trigger a script on production servers.
Run `composer update` to update the different packages and since we built our extensions as composer packages which will be updated as well and this usually takes a couple of minutes.
Run `setup:upgrade`; this upgrades the extensions and run any install/upgrade scripts that alter the database and/or install new extensions; this usually takes a minute.
Delete some directories from the directory “var”
Run `setup:di:compile`, this generates DI configuration files, which usually takes 5 minutes and can fail and cause a lot of trouble.
Clear everything inside the directory pub/static.
Run `setup:static-content:deploy`, which creates and deploys static content and assets for all themes, and for all locales, usually takes a whopping 20~30 minutes, shouldn’t fail but actually failed miserably when upgrading Magento to version 2.1.
Re-Indexing.
Flushing the cache.

The process is complicated, long and prone to failure. It causes downtime and takes on average 45 minutes.

This is definitely an unacceptable downtime; the process is overly complicated due to different caching and caching-like mechanisms like DI configuration and static-content deployment.

Conclusion

Magento 2 is definitely a great effort towards matching modern PHP frameworks, which we touched upon in different aspects and have always praised during day-to-day development.

However, Magento 2 team has a lot of challenges to tackle if they aim at staying the number 1 e-commerce solution, using and applying modern standards and technologies is an advantage; however, stability and performance are killers if not given proper focus.

At the end, we hope to see practical improvements during the coming months so as to restore our confidence in Magento being our go-to solution for e-commerce platforms which require scaling, performance, and integrations with the different systems.

Magento 2 vs Magento 1: A Comparison and Review (Part 1)

August 2, 2016March 8, 2017 Mahmoud Tantawy Leave a comment

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. The software was originally developed by Varien Inc., but after witnessing huge successes eBay started investing in Magento by buying shares and eventually acquired Varien.

In late 2015, Magento 2.0 was released, almost completely rewritten using modern programming concepts and technologies, we will be discussing the changes in Magento 2.0 and the new features through comparing it to Magento 1.

Extension & Theme Development

Magento 2 uses modern approaches in how it is built and how developers can build extensions and themes for it.

In Magento 1, themes and extensions’ files were distributed in many locations, we had to use a Module Manager “modman” which allows developers to place the files in 1 folder and then let modman create symlinks “shortcuts” to where Magento expects the files to be placed; this allows for better and easier development and also allows for using Code Version Control systems like “git”.

Magento 2 on the other hand uses modern approach; everything is a Composer package, which allows for better organization, updating, and code maintenance, along with automating some of the scripts and commands that need to be run after any updates.

In our current project with B.TECH, we made use of that fact and based all our work (both extensions and theme) on Composer packages, linked to our code repository to allow for instant code deployment (Continuous Deployment) for both staging and production servers.

This is definitely a step forward towards modern development cycle, and one that puts Magento 2 inline with modern PHP frameworks while opening new opportunities by enabling direct use of any of the thousands of packages available using Composer Packagist.

Frontend Development

Magento 1 uses Prototype JavaScript framework because -believe it or not- jQuery was not production-ready when Magento was in vitro, and it kept depending mainly on Prototype and the framework’s add-ons like Scriptaculous.

This made frontend development for Magento 1 a bit hard, although you can easily inject jQuery, sometimes you just need to stick with Prototype and work with it, which is not a pleasant experience usually.

Magento 2, on the other hand, uses modern approaches; it uses jQuery and Knockout, but more importantly, it uses RequireJS, which makes a webpage load only the required libraries instead of loading everything in all pages.

Magento 1 -and 2- has options for merging JS files, which, while reducing the number of HTTP requests, makes loading a huge JS file required with every page load, This was a valid recommendation in the early days;however, things have changed with HTTP 2.

HTTP 1.1 used to open a new connection for every HTTP request, so merging assets was a must; however, this has changed with HTTP 2 which allows for parallel requests on the same connection. This allows faster assets download and invalidates the recommendation for having less requests per page.

RequireJS is a good candidate for making better use of HTTP 2, as it makes use of HTTP 2 parallel requests per connection, while loading only required libraries per page, a win-win situation.

Our Senior Frontend Developer, Ahmed Alfy, wrote a nice introduction to RequireJS; make sure to check it out here.

Admin Dashboard

Magento 1 had a very clear dashboard; you can easily navigate and access everything; it loads fast and extensions can easily add functionalities to it.

Magento 2 revamped the dashboard completely. It is based on AngularJS, along with RequireJS for loading the assets, which, while sounds like a step towards utilizing modern technologies, raises many flags.

Magento 2’s dashboard is criticized due to the following.

It can easily fail to load if any of the assets didn’t load for any reason.
It is also much slower, due to having to wait for all the assets to load.
While using AngularJS sound promising, it is actually a disadvantage as it makes loading a large number of products or orders -or any relatively long list- very slow, and very CPU demanding, which can even cause the whole browser or computer to freeze for seconds or indefinitely sometimes.
It is built on AngularJS version 1, although version 2 is now out of beta.
While the overall look of the dashboard is modern and the use of icons and large menus should make it more usable and friendly, this is actually not the case as it is harder to navigate through all the menus and the different menu options and submenus.
While it is easy for extensions to add menu items, installing many extensions -which is normal- can easily make the dashboard’s menu much harder to use or not really usable at all.

Here is a quick example showing the steps required to reach the “Cache Management” page, which is a frequently visited page.

Magento 1

Hover over the “System” link in the horizontal menu.
Click on “Cache Management” in the vertical submenu.

Magento 2

Look for the “System” menu item in the vertical (sidebar menu).FYI you won’t be able to see it as extensions add menu items that push Magento’s menu items downwards.
Scroll down till the icon for “System” menu item is visible.
Click on it.
Inspect the submenu that slides, you won’t find the “Cache Management” link.
Scroll up till you see the link for “Cache Management”.
Click on it.

This is just an example of how the navigation, while might look seemingly better, is actually confusing and hard.

We have touched upon important aspects of the comparison and saw the advancements in Magento 2 in many areas. While it looks like Magento 2 is a real improvement upon Magento 1, in the second part of this blog post we will see comparison of performance and performance-related changes in Magento 2, we will also discuss the stability of Magento 2, so here is a sneak peak.

A Better Way for Obtaining Best Sellers in Magento

May 29, 2016July 12, 2016 Mahmoud Tantawy Leave a comment

Best Sellers, New Arrivals, and Promotions are three cornerstones of any ecommerce solution; they add great value for both customers and store owners.

Best sellers offer customers quick view over the products that other customers buy the most, which adds to the customer’s confidence when deciding to make a purchase and makes it easier for the customer to choose between alternatives.

The method of calculating best sellers is pretty straightforward; you count how many times has each product been sold and order the result by summed-up quantity ordered; then you’ve got yourself a best-sellers widget or products slider that should most probably be placed on the homepage.

In development mode, and on staging server as well, everything is working as you expected, until you move to production and the store owners decide to launch huge campaign that will drive thousands of visitors to the homepage; everything falls apart then, as each request makes Magento recalculate the best sellers and then load every product to show the product’s card.

Caching to the rescue, you tell yourself, and it helps relieve the stress off your database and your store comes back online. You could then make a change and try to refresh the cache while the visitors are hammering the homepage with requests looking for your store’s best selling products and that is exactly when you realize that even those split seconds of recreating the cache can become minutes of downtime as the requests keep hitting Magento while it is recreating the cache are all cache-miss that hammer the database directly until Magento gets it act together and starts serving content from the cache again.

Now let’s back off a moment, Magento has some powerful reports, one of which is, guess what, “Best Selling Products”! So why don’t we check how does Magento generate such report without bringing online stores to their knees, meanwhile, applying one of the most known software engineering principles in the process, which is DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) while we’re at it. Okay?!

Magento doesn’t generate this report on the fly or, to be specific, it doesn’t calculate best sellers on the fly; however, it makes use of it’s own cron jobs to aggregate best selling products every day and save them in a database table for later use. This allows Magento to directly hit this pre-calculated table of best sellers and just do the work of getting every product’s attributes, while sacrificing the ability to get fresh and up-to-date list of best sellers, which is not that crucial in most cases.

So let’s stand on the shoulders of giants and make use of that pre-calculated, automatically-aggregated table of best sellers we say, and instead of calculating the best selling products for every request, just query this table for the period you wish and then fetch the attributes you want to view for each product.

As a rule of thumb in Magento development, make sure to invest some time checking if the feature you want to develop/implement is already implemented in a way or another in Magento; this will save you so much time and effort on the long run and will also, most probably, give you a better idea for doing things. Have you encountered a similar problem while using Magento? Tell us what you did in the comments.