#gigacommerce – Scalable online shops with 1 billion items and more

 

Does an online shop with 1 billion items work on a standard cloud server? And that even with the demand for very low response times? We investigated this question during the #gigacommerce project.

The #gigacommerce setup contains 1 billion articles, which are combined into 10 million products. Each item contains attributes, images, prices and text like in any online store. The basis is a Symfony, Laravel and TYPO3 installation with the Aimeos E-Commerce extension, which access an ElasticSearch server.

All three frontends have been extensively tested to find out where the limits are. The Aimeos components showed that they scale almost infinitely, with response times of around 100 milliseconds. Interestingly, the only absolute limit in the tests was not the available hardware, but the network bandwidth, which was used up at over 600 PI/second. This makes it particularly interesting for peak load situations and TV advertising.

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First Stable Aimeos Web Shop Bundle For The Symfony PHP Framework

After months of development we’ve felt ready to release the first stable version of our Open Source web shop bundle for the Symfony PHP framework.

The shop bundle enables software developers to integrate e-commerce functionality into their applications immediately. Pre-configured pages and a complete demo data set reduces the time to the first working shop down to a few minutes, increasing productivity. And the best thing: It integrates well with existing bundles like FOSUserBundle for user registration and management!

Our attention has been laid on creating a high-performance shop bundle that scales up to 100 000+ products on a standard Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack. With additional software such as ElasticSearch, several million products per installation are possible without performance loss and in optimized server setups, we’ve seen response times down to 40ms.

As usability is one of the key success factors of online shops today, we’ve continuously tested and improved the user experience. The Aimeos “elegance” theme is the result which we are very proud of. If you are a developers who would like to create new themes, you are also able to completely rework the front-end by adding, removing or reordering all aspects only via configuration settings.

We hope you enjoy the bundle as much as we do! The new version and additional information is available at the Symfony web shop bundle page