Optimising Magento Development

26th December 2011 by iWeb

There are many available tools to help make Web Development projects quicker and more productive.

We will look at how a Magento Web Developer can help increase productivity, to turn on or off those common features all from the front end of Magento while developing on a site.

Magento Developer Toolbar

Magento Developer Toolbar is a powerful and must have plugin to any Magento Developer that lets you quickly access regular used functions without having to keep multiple tabs open with the admin backend

By using this plugin we can measure the performance of the site and see what is happening in the background such as database queries or which events or observers are called further optimising the Magento store as we will only choose what want to call rather than calling unnesseary events which may lead to less performance.

Home page statistics: Magento Version Number, Item Load time, Memory Usage and Number of Database Queries.

The plugin itself sits on the top right of the page, showing key page statistics on a per page basis and is unobtrusive and can be expanded to show more detailed statistics to aid further web development.

Home page statistics of the main store view of a default Magento Install

Using this plugin has enabled us to continuously review a Magento site performance by only calling what is needed aswell as speed up the Magento development build time.

Key Features

Requests: involved controller classes, modules, actions and request parameters
General Info: website id, website name, store id, store name, storeview id, storeview code, storeview name and configured caching method
Handles: overview of layout handles
Events/Observer: overview of events with its observers
Blocks: overview of block nesting
Config: enable/disable frontend hints, inline translation and cache clearing
PHP-Info: output of phpinfo()
Profiling: output of Varien_Profiler with function execution time, function count and memory usage
Additional Information: version information, page execution time and overall memory usage
DB-Profiler: Number of executed queries, average query length, queries per second, longest query length, longest query and detailed query listing including simple syntax highlighting of SQL