Magento 1.8 is painfully slow on my wamp localhost

Question

Magento 1.8 is painfully slow on my wamp localhost.

I have increased the memory in php.ini, following this answer,

max_execution_time = 1800
memory_limit = 512M

But it is still very very slow.

Anything else can I do?

Answer 1

there are usually 3 things which make the local dev environment slow:

1. there is no configured opcache, till php 5.3 this was APC, later in 5.5 the builtin OpCache. Make sure it is enabled. Still the first request is a bit slow, but the following ones are way faster.

2. disabled caches. Even if you heavily work on a shop, dont disable all caches. only clean them if needed. For example the config Cache is only hurting you during work with install scripts or on module configs. Layout cache is only hurting, when you work on the layout xml files. You can speed up your work a lot, by only clean caches (for example via a fast executed script) when really needed.

3. not enough memory. If you dont have enough memory available on your machine, it starts to swap, and swapping is painfully slow. Depending on what you have else to run on the machine, the needed amount differs.

Not on the list, disable your fancy anti virus tools. The Windows Defender is enough in the today world as defense, you mostly dont need any of the rest. Thats now a Dev machine you have, act responsible and dont execute every .exe you find on the internet. Anti Virus tools slow down every action, which is hurting a lot for process intensive programming like with magento.

Answer 2

You can try to set storing sessions and cache by memcache (check if php-memcache installed and loaded) at local.xml:

<config>
...
  <global>
  ...
    <session_save><![CDATA[memcache]]></session_save>
    <session_save_path><![CDATA[tcp://localhost:11211?persistent=1&weight=2&timeout=10&retry_interval=10]]></session_save_path>
    <session_cache_limiter><![CDATA[private]]></session_cache_limiter>
    <cache>
        <backend>Memcache</backend>
        <slow_backend></slow_backend>
        <memcached>
            <servers>
                <server>
                    <host><![CDATA[127.0.0.1]]></host>
                    <port><![CDATA[11211]]></port>
                    <persistent><![CDATA[0]]></persistent>
                    <weight><![CDATA[]]></weight>
                    <timeout><![CDATA[]]></timeout>
                    <retry_interval><![CDATA[]]></retry_interval>
                    <status><![CDATA[]]></status>
                </server>
            </servers>
            <compression><![CDATA[0]]></compression>
            <cache_dir><![CDATA[]]></cache_dir>
            <hashed_directory_level><![CDATA[]]></hashed_directory_level>
            <hashed_directory_umask><![CDATA[]]></hashed_directory_umask>
            <file_name_prefix><![CDATA[]]></file_name_prefix>
        </memcached>
    </cache>
  ...
  </global>
...
</config>