Recommendations for running Magento on Azure websites with ClearDB Database - magento

I've set up a shop in Magento using Azure web apps but it's running very slow at the moment. I've scaled to the standard pricing tier and turned on autoscale but it's still very slow. Could it be the database that is the problem? I only have the free Mercury plan and I still need to upgrade for more space so I will do that.
Anyone running Magento on Azure web apps with ClearDB that have recommendations for good performance? It´s not a very big site, only about 40 products.
Thanks for any tips!

I would highly recommend upgrading the the ClearDB from the Mercury plan. I am confident that is your bottleneck.
Magento is a very db intensive application and the free (Mercury) tier is for very basic performance and small apps such as small wordpress blogs.
Try upgrading to the Venus or Saturn plan and should see tremendous improvement in performance.
Another option is that you could setup your own Linux VM and install MySQL, Apache, etc and then scale up from there. if you are comfortable doing that it will give you some more control.

Related

Kentico CMS peformance

I am exploring CMS open source system based on .net platform which is capable of handing 5000+ users. One of them is kentico CMS. I want to know whether Kentico will give good performance and response in case if 5000+ users are accessing the system.
Kentico is a high performing solution. 5000+ users are just the tip of the iceberg in regards to what Kentico can handle. On Kentico.com website there is a scalability and Performance section. There's a report you can download which talks about performance in v10. Version 11 will be as good if not better that described in that report.
References:
https://www.kentico.com/product/all-features/development/scalability-and-performance
http://www.kentico.com/product/resources/brochures/kentico-10-performance-report/kentico10_performance.pdf

basics of cloud computing

I am a beginner trying to understand why do I or others need heroku or other cloud services for application development. I want to know for what sort of applications or scenarios, do we need heroku or similar services?
For example, if I am an application developer, I can write my application (windows or linux) on my machine, run and test it on my machine and then share it publicly on sourceforge.net or some other website for free or for some money. I mean all of us download and run applications and programs from all over the web e.g., notepad++ or skype. They come as binaries and we can install them on our machines easily. I want to know where Heroku or cloud comes into the picture and do I/we need it? and why?
Please let me know if you need more explanation.
Heroku and Other PaaS providers helps you in application deployment and gives hosting of your application and some other features like High availability, scaling, load balancing, monitoring and ready made environment to run your apps.
Now why they cost? PaaS providers runs your application on virtual instance and use some management and deployment tool in front of it to manage and monitor your application that taken care for you. Manging a server is not easy now a day for big application, you need a high level of expertise and enough time to monitor periodically(may be hours). If you go for free hosting, you will not get all these feature of PaaS. Again it's your choice. If you can't bear down time and any data lose, you should prefer PaaS else you can go for Free hosting.
First of all notepad++ is not an application users of which need to interact or share. So it is not a good choice for to give an example. Heroku and other cloud providers host cloud applications. Generally, these applications, as part of their nature, need scaling. And scaling requires more hardware. Setting up hardware to scale your application requires time, money and expertise, so it is expensive. Buying these as a service is more appropriate for most people. I would offer you to read about IAAS, PAAS, SAAS concepts to start.
For a beginner or an individual hobbyist, the charm of Heroku or a similar PaaS lies in the fact that Heroku (and others) do away with the complexity of building and deploying cloud/web/saas software.
A typical app developer just knows/needs to know about his/her app. That is it. Why should you have to worry about how many machines you need to run your app on or get charged for machine time when you are sipping coffee and your app isn't doing anything or you are just trying out new things and don't know if it works. You can just write code and push your app to Heroku (or other platforms like it) and let them worry about things like servers, availability and reliability of your app. Yes, you will need to make some simple choices but those are much simpler choices than planning for scalability or database backup. And like any software platform, you will learn with time as to what suits your needs best. You adjust your app and things work fine. And remember you pay only for what you use and that can go up or down when you do more or less with the platform.
Also, if your app turns out to be a really popular app and you need to scale the app to support your newly founded fame :), you can ramp up your infrastructure on the fly for some affordable price.

Magento - Multistore implementation

Im looking at switching to Magento for a project im going to start.
I was wondering if i could get a bit of advice regarding the Multi-Store implementation.
Does this allow seperate admin users for each store?
Would you recommend this implementation for a small hosted ecommerce application?
Cheers,
Warning - as I'm sure you know, don't start a project with Magento unless you are willing to put a lot of time into it.
That said, to my knowledge the Multistore setup allows one to run multiple stores with the same administration section. You should be able to create multiple admin users - but restricting them to a store isn't available in normal old community edition. It might be available in one of the pay editions.
That said, this extension may do the trick for you: http://www.aitoc.com/en/magentomods_advanced_permissions.html. Note: I've never personally tried this extension and so cannot vouch for it.
Edit
I realized that I never answered your second question.
Though Magento is a very powerful platform with a lot of features, I would not recommend using it for a small hosted ecommerce application. For a small hosted ecommerce store I would consider running Wordpress with the WP-E-Commerce plugin. Wordpress is great for managing website content - and WP-E-Commerce has a lot of features and is consistently being developed and improved upon.
If you are going to go with Magento then I would reccomend using Nexcess hosting. They specialize in hosting Magento and their Magento plans are already optimized for running Magento websites.
enterprise (and maybe professional) edition has the feature you are talking about, separating admin users by store. If you need to restrict that in admin level with community edition you can set up multiple software versions from same development branch with different databases (git is awesome on version tool for that). Lots of different ways to do so if Enterprise is out of reach
regarding of performance i guess you will need a powerful VPS or dedicated machine if you are serious about it and as the traffic grows you then should think about load balancing. Look for magento dedicated host companies for that and it won't run in $5 or $20 per month hosts
You asked:
Does Magento allow seperate admin users
for each store?
The free version (Community version) of Magento doesn't have this feature. There will be a single admin.
But the admin can create user and roles. So, some users can be assigned only to product and category addition page. And some users can only be assigned to Sales part.
Separate admin for each store: This feature is present in Enterprise version of Magento but its cost is too high. At present, it Starts at $12,990 USD/yr
In my opinion, using or not using Magento depends upon the functionality you are searching for your shop.
If you need lots of features and functionalities for your Shop then go for Magento.
If you just want general functions like displaying product, adding to cart, and checkout (that's all), then you may search for any other open source shopping cart.
You may try Oscommerce. I have not used it much but I think there is a Oscommerce module for multi admin login for each store.

Oracle license for development environment?

I'm sorry that I have to ask that here, but I haven't found a conclusive answer on the oracle page or in the internet. I've even been on the phone with a sales rep, but they couldn't help me neither.
What kind of Oracle Setups/licenses are you using for your development environments? We currently are using 10g XE which only has one significant limitation: the 4gb database size limit. Are there any other 'free' versions which don't have such limitations? And if not, what would be the most economic version/combination? The often have a hard user limit which are ridiculous low.
Thanks!
Cheers
Reto
PS. I'm not sure if I have to mention that: I'm not looking for any illegal solutions
Since it appears that there exists a production environment, the license for the software you download from OTN will almost certainly not be sufficient. Since it sounds like each developer has a local development environment, however, you should be able to make use of the Personal Edition. This is a relatively inexpensive ($460 perpetual/ $92 for a 1-year license plus support in the Oracle Store at the moment) version of Oracle that is intended to be used by a single developer on a local machine. It has all the functionality of the enterprise edition of the database.
You can download Oracle Database 11g (and most other Oracle solutions) from their website oracle.com.
All you need is to register for free, and download the application, you don't need any license if it is for personal use.

VPS/VDS for Continuous Integration (TeamCity)

We are looking at moving some of existing infrastructure to the virtual space, hence the question:
Would you recommend a virtual hosting provider for hosting TeamCity CI server, based on your experience?
It'd be nice to get company names/links but if that's against the rules listing your VPS configuration should also do.
According to this answer on JetBrains forum http://www.jetbrains.net/devnet/message/5258265#5258265 these are the recommended specs for CI box:
Based on our experience, a modest hardware like 3.2 dual core CPU, 3.2Gb memory under Windows, 1Gb network adapter can provide acceptable performance for the setup
I don't think that VPS market has anything to offer in that space with acceptable price tag.

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