#gigacommerce – Aimeos shop performance with 1 billion items

 

Aimeos has recently proven to be capable of handling one billion articles and more in an online shop using the #gigacommerce extension. This is far more than the number of articles at the Amazon market place which is currently estimated by around 562 million items. But the sheer numbers doesn’t say anything about the performance so how fast can Aimeos delivery content when users browsing the shop pages?

The setup

For a realistic test Aimeos has been set up in a standard cloud hosting environent sponsored by Profihost, an e-commerce hoster from Hannover, Germany. They provided two of their “Flexserver Expert” packages, which are virtual machines running on a cluster with Intel Xeon Skylake 2,6 GHz CPUs.

Hardware

  • LAMP VM: 8 Core, 16GB RAM, 17GB on SSD

  • ElasticSearch VM: 8 Core, 32GB RAM, 465GB on SSD

Software

  • Debian Linux, Apache 2.4, MySQL 5.7, PHP 7.2, ElasticSearch 5.4

  • Laravel 5.7, Symfony 4.1, TYPO3 8.7

  • Aimeos 2018.10, ai-elastic extension 2018.10

Test procedure

All tests have been done with Loader.io, a SaaS provider for load tests. The latency between the clients and the server is about 32ms, which is included in the response times. A typical page request of a detail page therefore looks as follows:

ACTION TIME
Stalled 5.26 ms
Request sent 0.12 ms
Waiting (TTFB) 50.74 ms
Content Download 18.33 ms
Sum 75.28 ms

The response time therefore consists of the network latency (32ms), the processing on the server (50.7ms – 32ms = 18.7ms) and the transmission time of the HTML page (18.3ms). The network latency is the largest influencing factor here and can be reduced only with difficulty in real operation. In general it is lower the closer the server is geographically to the customer and the better the connection of the hoster is.

The Aimeos list and detail page were tested, both with cache and without. The cache does NOT contain the complete page (“full page cache”) as in other shop systems, but only page fragments such as the product list or the product details. The page frame is provided by Laravel, Symfony and TYPO3, in which the fragments are inserted before delivering the page to the client.

Test results

The tests showed that Laravel 5.7 and Symfony 4.1 are about the same speed. In the evaluations of Loader.io, there were no significant differences between the two and therefore the results were summarized. The only measurable difference is about 5ms, which Symfony 4.1 can generate on an unloaded system faster than Laravel 5.7. Under load there is no more difference.

With TYPO3 as frontend, the server can process fewer requests per second, but TYPO3 is not directly comparable to Laravel/Symfony. As a complete content management system, TYPO3 allows the maintenance of pages by editors, which is not easily possible with Laravel/Symfony.

Conclusion

With over 600 PI/second and a processing time on the server less than 20ms, the Aimeos E-Commerce System is certainly one of the fastest shop systems. The differences between list and detail view are mainly due to the different page size (189KB to 66KB) and the resulting longer time for data transfer.

Competitors can only achieve similar results by storing complete pages in a Varnish cache and loading shopping carts and other dynamic content through AJAX queries. However, Aimeos is so fast that this would make response times even worse, because the separate query for e.g. the shopping cart is not necessary at all with Aimeos.

Even without cache the number of 130-150 PI/second and the response times of 162ms incl. network latency (130ms without latency) are excellent values compared to other shop systems, especially since the system can scale up to 1 billion and more items. This makes Aimeos particularly suitable for high-load scenarios such as TV advertising.

More about #gigacommerce: https://aimeos.com/gigacommerce

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