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We run an online store and are looking for a FPC solution. There are a lot of players in the field and it is hard to choose one. We were using the Tinybrick Opencommerce Lightspeed Warp FPC but we are running into a lot of issues with it. I would prefer a company that has live support but I know this is likely not possible. Our hosting company stated that Varnish would require four times more hosting power than what we currently have. We tried Lesti FPC but the speed improvement was very small.

Store owners only, can you please recommend a FPC solution that you work with that has significant speed improvement and offers good support and does not cause problems with the site? If you would include a link to your site for testing that would be amazing!

We have already done a lot of speed optimization for the site on the hosting end and on the site itself. We were loading the page at 2.5 seconds but after we decided to make the whole site EV SSL based on the new Google recommendation, our load time is not sitting at around 4.20 seconds load. We are hoping that the FPC solution will be able to help out with the load times. Thanks!

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  • Thank you so much for the useful feedback. I will make sure to mention this to our hosting provider. We are looking to change hosting solutions as well. The feedback that Sonassi provided was useful as well. When relayed to our hosting company, they stated that since we are on a virtual environment we will have issues with HTTPS on the whole site. Now looking for a dedicated server to provide better performance as well. – Ramon Nov 4 '14 at 21:38
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    Really wouldn't recommend running a production site under HHVM yet - it still far too heavily developed. So it's not a secret, it's not offered because 100% compatibility under Magento is not guaranteed. – Jonathan Hussey Nov 5 '14 at 9:31
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My company develops Evolved Caching which is a FPC solution so I'm not a store owner but I will make a few comments on your question.

Firstly only you can really make a decision on which FPC solution is best for your store - I'm not going to say our solution is the 'best' as it means very little, everyone who develops FPC solution is probably going to say that. I would however recommend you trial all the options you can for free before committing to one, that way you can test the extension and the support before you buy (you can trial ours here if you are interested). In my opinion if a company is confident in their product they have no reason to not offer a free trial.

Secondly Magento has such wide possibility for development it's completely impossible for any solution to work flawlessly on all stores. If any FPC developer says their solution will work without fail on every install - just don't believe them as it won't be true. The key here is the versatility in the way the extension has been developed and the willingness of the developers to help you make the extension work correctly on your particular install. If they are unwilling to help, then you probably want to think about whether you want to go with them or not. Essentially if the extension has been developed well, and the store has been developed well, it shouldn't be too hard to get caching working correctly even if there are a few initial issues.

Thirdly if adding SSL has increased page load times by nearly 2 seconds - you definitely have a problem there. The only overhead SSL adds is the handshake and this shouldn't take anything like 2 seconds to complete - it should be adding milliseconds not seconds onto load times.

It sounds like you have pretty decent page load times already assuming you can get SSL sorted out and the 2.5 seconds is uncached load times so you are in a good position to consider a FPC solution, but as I said above, look at what available, test what you can and make your own mind up. Obviously I hope you choose ours, but if you don't that's ok ;)

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  • Thank you Jonathan for your feedback. After speaking with several people, I see that your statement is very true. Cache is not flawless and all can cause some sort of issues. I guess it depends on the specific site and the best idea is to try several ones like we are doing now. Thanks! – Ramon Nov 4 '14 at 21:56
  • Good luck with your particular cache implementation! If you have decided one of the answers is 'correct' here could you mark it as accepted? – Jonathan Hussey Nov 5 '14 at 7:50
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No cache is the best cache.

Whilst your question is "What is the best cache", your problem is "How can I make my store fast". Sadly your question will do nothing other than solicit opinion, rather than fact, so contrary to site etiquette, I'm going to solve your problem, not answer your question - because you are asking the wrong question.

Caching != Performance

If changing your store from HTTP to HTTPS has penalised page load times by 1.7s, then you have a number of issues.

  1. Out of date CPU with no support for SSL hardware acceleration (check with grep aes /proc/cpuinfo)
  2. Old OpenSSL library without support for hardware acceleration (ie. Less than 1.0.1)
  3. Poor cipher selection leading to inefficient use of client/server hardware

Any competant hosting company could identify and fix this within seconds.

2.5 seconds to load a page in Magento is exceptionally slow, even with EVERY Magento cache OFF, pages should load in less than 0.7 seconds. Your poor page load times are down to two issues,

  1. Improperly configured/specified server
  2. Poorly built store

Fixing either of these is easy,

  1. Test your store with a competent Magento specialist hosting provider, if its quicker, there's your answer
  2. Profile your code, isolate the performance bottlenecks in your template/modules and fix them

Caches serve a single purpose, reduce hardware requirements and resource usage for scenarios where you see high levels of repeated requests for the same content.

Caches ARE NOT to attempt to make a site faster. They do nothing more than obstruct content updates, impair store-to-customer personalisation, give the illusion of speed resulting in you ignoring the actual problem - the core problem of poor performance that will cripple your checkout, your logged in customer experience, your admin actions, and anything else unique on your store that a cache has no place for.

If you want your site to be fast, fix what is making it slow!

Disclaimer: Sonassi is a hosting provider, whilst my suggestion might be to use an alternative host (or at least try one to rule it out as a means of diagnosis), it by no means makes my suggestions any less valid.

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  • Hello Sonassi! Thank you for your useful feedback. Our current hosting company is pretty well optimized to run Magento. I already had our developer work extensively on the site to get the 2 second load time. While your feedback is useful and I will ask our hosting company about it, the sites built by your company do not load that fast. Checking your portfolio, I checked 5 random site. One loaded super fast, less than a second, the rest were 2.5-4 seconds load time using GTmetrix. – Ramon Nov 3 '14 at 22:26
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    Hey Kalpesh. Shopping questions aren't permitted, they will merely drive opinion based responses. Given the underlying tone of the OPs post was how to make his store faster, I answered both his questions about SSL performance and how to address underlying store performance - which will always boil down to two things, hosting and code. The only way to isolate the former is to try another host, it's quick, free, painless and definitive. The only way to solve the latter is to profile the code. The OP doesn't need a cache, he/she needs guidance. – Ben Lessani - Sonassi Nov 4 '14 at 0:03
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    Kalpesh, did you read the first half of my answer? I went into detail to outline the exact cause of an increase in page load time for HTTPS content, it's almost exclusively a hosting issue if the server cannot handshake HTTPS with the same performance as HTTP. On aged hardware, with old OpenSSL libs and a poor cipher selection, it will cause a significant increase in both client and server side negotiation. – Ben Lessani - Sonassi Nov 4 '14 at 0:12
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    Don't worry about it. I've been posting on Magento SE for years, I can live with a downvote if you think it is warranted - the only way I can better my responses is to take constructive criticism :) – Ben Lessani - Sonassi Nov 4 '14 at 0:31
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    HHVM is still under heavy development and should not yet be used in production installs. Performance gains are also actually not great and nothing like the improvement you see from implementing FPC/Varnish - rewrite Magento in hack and could then be worthwhile. Using it also currently introduces a bug when applying coupon codes where the total is wrong (there is a fix) and from my testing the HHVM process quits for no reason from time to time so if you don't have an upstart (or similar) job to start the process again your site will go down. Wait a few more versions and then think about HHVM. – Jonathan Hussey Nov 5 '14 at 10:56
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We're using Lesti::FPC in our store, which is a great and free extension (http://gordonlesti.com/lestifpc/). It is highly customizable and can be easily used to speed up your website. I agree with the other comments that FPC isn't the only solution to speeding up your site, but this extension helped us greatly. Just make sure you define your refresh actions and URL parameters in the settings, otherwise you'd end up with filters not working for example.

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  • OP has already tried Lesti::FPC – Jonathan Hussey Nov 4 '14 at 9:32
  • We tried Lesti and while it did work, the performance improvement was not at all like the Warp cache. It did however install very easily and was simply to configure for the most part. – Ramon Nov 4 '14 at 21:57
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I work for a specialized magento hosting company from germany and I'm a bit surprised your hosting company told you, you need four times the power.

You might need some extra memory for varnish but on the other hand the CPU power needed should go down not up, as you save the CPU load php would create when you catch it up with varnish.

generally I would recommand varnish over integrated FPC solutions but again, this depends on your concrete situation and your traffic.

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