Introduction
What is Speed Booster?
Speed Booster is a set of high-performance caching modules for Magento. Benchmarks have shown this module to increase server response times by 5-6x over default Magento caching. You can expect response times to drop from default Magento 2-4 second page load to 600ms - 1 second, even during traffic peaks.
How it Works
Speed Booster Caching takes the tedious resource intensive work that is required to generate a catalog, and stores much of that data in cache stores. This approach proves to alleviate much stress from the web servers during catalog navigation.
Speed Booster automatically caches key catalog and cms blocks of your store for you. The following layouts currently included:
- catalog_category_view
- catalog product_view
- catalog_layer_view
- cms_page
- cms_block
Caching these layouts is useful when loading entire pages on the front-end with default magento, or if you're using a whole-page caching utility like Lightspeed. In the later case, if a cached page can't be loaded (content specific to a user needed), then Speed Booster blocks can salvage the speed decrease of a page that occurs from that full page load by returning portions of the page in a cached fashion.
Pre-requisites
Code/Conflicts
- NO EDITS OR MODIFICATIONS TO MAGENTO CORE (Typically, this includes all code inside the app/code/core folder)
- No conflicting modules (or conflicting custom code) installed (Typically, if installed component/module affects same functionality as SpeedBooster--caching, you should be wary of conflicts)
Magento Version
- Community Edition 1.0 - 1.5.
Installation
Before you Install
As with all our modules (and all modules in general), installing this module directly and solely in a live environment is strongly discouraged. It is recommended that it be installed in a development environment, configured, tested, and then deployed to your live environment through your deployment method of choice (i.e. - git, subversion, etc...). If this is not possible, then the next best thing would be to make a FULL backup before installation.
Installing the Basic Application
Navigate to the root of your application. You should see folders like (app, downloader, skin, etc...). If you have not already used Magento Connect or any other Pear package management for your installation, you will need to run the following:
terminal Setting up Pear
If you receive a permission error, run the following:
terminal Pear Permissions
Then (Replace /path/to... with the path to your Speedbooster TarBall.):
terminal Pear Install
If you ever need to UN-install Speed Booster, you can run:
terminal Pear UN-Install
These Commands Giving You Grief?
Don't give up yet. If you're not a veteran to command line, it can be just a character or two that makes the difference. If you are on a shared host, you might not be allowed to run pear installs (which is lame, but happens). If that's the case, try asking them if they could run them for you (sometimes they're nice that way). If they really are mean (or just not setup that way), then you might have to do a manual install. However, your best bet is to save it for the last option. It's definitely easier to run one command than try to copy files manually.
Installing Speed Booster will rewrite and extend the appropriate blocks. No additional setup is required unless your application has already extended any of these Blocks:
- Mage_Catalog_Block_Category_View
- Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View
If you have already extended any of these blocks, your custom blocks will need to extend these instead:
- TinyBrick_FastCatalog_Block_Category_View
- TinyBrick_FastCatalog_Block_Product_View
Testing
Now that you've implemented Speed Booster caching, you probably want to see some results. You should be able to see an immediate speed increase just by browsing your site. If you need the exact figures, we recommend using a tool like the Firebug plug-in for Firefox to assist. This article should have some more suggestions on how to get those numbers.
General Usage
So you've gone through the installation. Now, let's give you a tour of how to control Lightspeed from the admin. The main control area of the admin resides in the System -> Cache Management page. It should look something like this:
The important components of this page include the following cache components:
- CMS Blocks - SpeedBooster
- CMS Pages - SpeedBooster
Each of these components are areas controlled by TinyBrick Performance products. If you've never used the cache control page, try here. Also, let me offer a parallel to bring it home.
While the checkboxes (like a sink faucet) may turn off and on the flow of water, the sink holds cached pages, blocks, etc...(water) that was generated while caching was enabled (faucet was on). While unchecking a box (and then saving) may turn off the faucet, to empty the sink (prevent the website from loading cached pages, blocks, etc...) you'll need to refresh the cache (empty the sink). This is typically done by using the drop-down at the top left. Setting it to refresh, and then saving the page.
On a default Magento/SpeedBooster installation, the ideal running state is to have all the caching component checked. However, if you have other caching component installed, they may not be checked.
Caution: Conflicts
We've experienced issues with Lightspeed/Speedbooster installed along side other 3rd-party caching components. Install other caching components at your own risk. While we cannot test and support compatibility between other products much of the time, we receive reports of varying experience with using similarly purposed modules along side one another. Use caution in attempting to install modules of similar nature at the same time.
That's the tour. Short and sweet. If you have any further questions/issues, please refer to our Troubleshooting/FAQs. Enjoy SpeedBooster page performance!