What parts of the model layer can be bypassed in the interest of performance optimization

Question

I'm currently seeing that for a database table with a very simple schema (about 5 fields), it's inserting new records at a rate of just under ~50 inserts / second, in my local development environment (SSD drive) - this is with no observers on the model populating associated tables.

Using direct SQL I'm seeing quite an improvement - ~1800 inserts / second. We're thinking about attempting to optimize the performance of our models, but of course we don't want to lose all of the nice stability and flexibility that the Magento core gives us.

I'm wondering whether someone has gone this route before and whether there are some easy wins in terms of components of the model layer that can be bypassed relatively safely that will give significant performance boosts.

Things like:

• Class name resolution
• before and after save events
• Event dispatches
• Transactions
• etc.

UPDATE: I lied, there actually were some additional queries firing off of observers or afterSave()'s, which I saw when I inspected the database query log. Benchmarking against a totally simple entity actually gives me ~300 rows / second with Magento models - only MySQL overhead are transactions.

Answer 1

One thing which can speed up the whole site is to remove all references to Varien_Profiler on your production site. Even if the profiler is disabled, it always checks whether it is enabled so every call to Varien_Profiler:: will result in an additional if statement. Of course, removing all these calls comes at the cost of not being able to use the profiler anymore. However, this can speed up the whole site by maybe 5% or so (this is a subjective eperience, but there are MANY calls to Varien_Profiler all over Magento). I actually wrote a little shell script to automatically comment out these calls in all the files and I will add this to my post tomorrow when I am at work and have my code ready.

As promised now the code to comment out these calls:

grep -l "Varien_Profiler" * -R > profiler.txt 
for x in `cat profiler.txt` 
do 
sed -i '/Varien_Profiler/s/^/\/\//' $x
done

This should be run in the linux console both in the app/ as well as in the lib/ folder. You might need to adjust the file /lib/Varien/Profiler.php manually afterwards. Also note that you should test this thoroughly in a safe environment before taking it live - but I guess this should be obvious ;)

Answer 2

When executing a lot of saves on Magento models it's best to disable the Magento indexer which slows the process down:

$processes = Mage::getSingleton('index/indexer')->getProcessesCollection();
$processes->walk('setMode', array(Mage_Index_Model_Process::MODE_MANUAL));
$processes->walk('save');

And enabling it when your done:

$processes->walk('setMode', array(Mage_Index_Model_Process::MODE_REAL_TIME));
$processes->walk('save');