Finding performance leaks in Magento

When optimizing a website, we can do lots of things to the server environment but the application that runs on it can always be faster.

When you have a Magento store and one kind of page is significantly slower than other pages, it could possible be that there is a performance issue on that page.

To find performance issues, we can use the Magento Profiler. With the Magento Profiler, we can see how much time every process takes to render a page.

Getting ready

To enable the profiler, we have to modify the apache environment variables. We can do this in the VirtualHost configuration or in the .htaccess file. Ensure that you have access to one of these files.

How to do it...

In the following steps, we will specify how we can use the Magento profiler:

1. To enable the profiler, add the following code in the VirtualHost or the .htaccess file:

   SetEnv MAGE_PROFILER html
   

2. If you changed this setting in the VirtualHost file, reload the Apache server.

3. Reload a page in the frontend...