Magento-1 Vs. Magento-2

Magento 2 is the latest Magento version that is used now days by most of the business owners. An important feature of Magento 2 is in-built full page cache. Further, it also supports Varnish as backend.

The Magento community believes Magento 2 to be the fastest platform as compared to its first version. This was known when the performance of both versions was checked using various cache settings in order to see which combination provides best results.

Presently, there are two servers each having 6 CPU cores and 8 GB RAM. Both the servers are using SSD for data storage.

Server set up:

As we discussed, there are two servers each with 6 CPU cores and 8GB RAM with SSD storage, Apache2.2.22, PHP 5.5.30, MYSQL 5.5.46+ Magento 1.9.2.2+ Sample data 1.9.1.0 and Full Page Cache 1.5.6

The second server comes with Apache 2.4.10, PHP 5.6.14, MYSQL 5.6.25 + Magento 2.0.0 + Sample data + Varnish 4.0.2. Here, in Magento 2; the full page cache settings are transformed to Varnish as it can be used as backend when needed.

Speed Test tools:

Here, we performed various tests with the Apache Jemeter. Magento Performance Kit was not used here as this performance Tool kit doesn’t support Magento CE 1.9.2.2 and is completely designed for Magento EE hence it is not suitable here.

From Magento 2.x, the toolkit supports CE and is different from Magento 1.x version. The toolkit measures only the server response time without considering AJAX. In order to test a website in a proper manner on Magento 2.x; here we will choose Selenium Webdriver Plugin for Apache JMeter.

With this plugin; one can use fully functional browser like as Google Chrome that is used for Performance test. The full page loading time can be measured easily including AJAX.

Performance Test Scenario:

The tests were performed in the below mentioned scenarios:

• When the guest visits home page
• When the guest goes to Category
• When the category is filtered by colour
• When the category is filtered by material/purpose

With this experiment, one can know the time difference between the page loading speed along with full page cache variants and without it. It consists of server response generation, network data transfer, page rendering by browser as well as AJAX needs execution time.

This test is very close to what user actually sees on the website. The user sees the page before it gets loaded fully and the data that we have received here can be treated as the worst case scenario.

The Performance results will be as follows:

The difference between sample data for Magento 1.9.2.2 and Magento 2.0.0 with FPC is it doesn’t have any inbuilt FPC and this can be considered as “off”. Later on, different variants of FPC usage can be compared in Magento 2.0.0 such as:

• FPC off
• FPC on , Varnish off
• FPC on, Varnish On.

When FPC is used with Varnish then it shows up to 30% increase in page load speed when compared with the variant where FPC is off and 3% increase when it is compared to the variant with only FPC on.

This shows that FPC in Magento 2.0.0 provides up to 27% increase for page load in browser. It is great result for free inbuilt feature. The page load speed in Magento 1.9.2.2 and FPC as well as in Magento 2.0.0 + FPC + Varnish is as mentioned here:

Take Away

FPC when used with Magento 2 increases the page load speed in the browser. With higher load, Varnish offers a bigger advantage by reducing the server load with smaller traffic when the margin is quite thin.