Scripting Magento
There are times when the web-based administration of Magento hits a snag and no longer works as quickly as we’d like it to. Perhaps product exports or backups time out, or refreshing the URL rewrite...
View ArticleConfiguring Memcached in Magento 1.4
In the Magento 1.4 release, the memcached backend configuration has changed. There are now more options listed than in previous Magento versions. Some confusion has resulted in how to configure...
View ArticleUpgrading to Magento 1.4.2.0
The latest stable version of magento, version 1.4.2.0, was released on December 8th. Upgrading Magento Community Edition always poses some problem or another, mostly due to user-customized themes and...
View ArticleDiagnosing slow PHP execution with Xdebug and KCachegrind
Tracking down a performance issue to the actual PHP app can be hard enough by itself, but what do you do once you’re sure that the app itself is the bottleneck? The excellent Xdebug extension has many...
View ArticleDiagnosing MySQL Performance Bottlenecks With Maatkit
Hello again! Last time we looked at optimizing performance of web apps, we were checking out how to diagnose PHP performance bottlenecks using XDebug to generate valgrind-style logs of what PHP was...
View ArticleOptimizing APC Cache Settings for Magento
APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is an opcode cache for PHP that works very well to speed up page loads when used on servers running Magento. There are many opcode caches available (APC, accelerator,...
View ArticleMagento Catalog Search XSS on Some Themes
We’ve seen a few customers failing PCI scans due to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the catalogsearch page. Initially it seemed like it was a bug in Magento where it wasn’t sanitizing its...
View ArticleReflection and Late Static Binding in PHP
Late static binding (LSB) is new to PHP 5.3 (released 30 June 2009) but until recently there was a bug in how it worked with reflection. See the manual page for LSB with some examples and definition....
View ArticleNexcess Moving to Apache/PHP-FPM
Here at Nexcess we’re always on the lookout for ways of improving our technology stack for our clients. This means making things like Varnish or Memcached, which can improve application performance...
View ArticlePHP Sessions and Objects
For the majority of my PHP career I didn’t store objects in a session. Not that it’s a difficult thing, I simply didn’t have a need to in the past. Now that I do, I have discovered a peculiar (in …...
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