An Optimisation Story

My Talk at Mage Titans Manchester 2016

In November, the Mage Titans event was back in Manchester again with a jam packed schedule of talented speakers (old and new) with some fascinating content on the bill. I was privileged to be on stage sharing my experience around FPC (Full Page Caching) and in particular, ensuring it is working efficiently.

The origins of my talk stemmed from a blog post by Max Chadwick and his Nomad Mage talk, Max discusses extensively how FPC works in Magento 1 and several strategies on how to ensure your FPC is working effectively (well worth checking out!). Off the back of Max’s work he released a module to monitor and report on the efficiency of the FPC in Magento 1.

The module reports on how often you are receiving Full Hits, Partial Hits or Misses from the cache. Full Hits being the fastest Magento can return your content as it is all returned from cache, Misses being the slowest as Magento has to load all the content. Partial Hits were the interesting one to me, if there are hole punched containers on the page and they do not have cached content available, Magento has more overhead to pull in that content and therefore you will get slower page loads than if everything was cached.

The diagram below outlines this concept and I go in to further detail in my talk.

We used this module in a project of ours and it was clear there were issues around a lack of FPC “Full Hits”. I go on to discuss how we overcame this due to two modules implementing hole punching in an unnecessarily inefficient manner.

The way those modules had implemented hole punching was a mistake, but I go on to mention the importance of embracing such mistakes, as they are an opportunity to learn. But more importantly, I encourage the sharing of such mistakes, as this can make your team or even the wider community stronger for it!

FPC is a very powerful feature of both Magento 1 and Magento 2, we need to be careful in our approach and mindful of the impact that implementation decisions could have.

New features should be planned with FPC in mind, rather than implementing code and then dealing with FPC as an afterthought. Better planning should ensure your FPC stays efficient and your site stays fast!

Mage Titans Manchester 2016 was a great success and I enjoyed having the opportunity to talk to many interesting people in the community, I hope to meet more of you at future events in 2017!

Please check out my talk below and let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback.