MageMeter — a new way to present and share Magento performance benchmarks

When Marko Martinović started working at Inchoo, we asked him what he likes to do in his free time. Enthusiastically enough, he replied: ”I write some code.” That was a bit over two years ago. He has been a member of the Inchoo family since April 2013 and today, we talked about his new project — MageMeter. All that ”I write some code.” wasn’t only talk, he made a catalog of Magento and Magento2 benchmarks metered using official Performance Toolkit.

We couldn’t restrain ourselves from asking a few questions and getting more info on the subject.

Hi Marko! For starters, tell us a bit about your role at Inchoo at the moment.

Marko: Hi all, at the moment I lead growing team of talented Magento developers, with goal of advancing assigned projects and improving development practices wherever possible. I also lead development efforts for one of valued Inchoo clients Zee&Co Online Limited, more precisely I coordinate development activities for fashion retail store Zee&Co.

​How did you choose the name of the team?

Marko: Actually picking the name was a team effort. Since all the teams at Inchoo are named after cities, we simply sat in front of Google Maps and each member selected his own list of candidates. Winner turned out to be “Echo” after small city of Echo, Oregon, United States and was selected by voting. I must point out that any resemblance to one of the basic PHP programming language constructs is purely coincidental

You were one of the speakers at MM14PL with a topic “Review of Magento 2 Caching Features”. You criticized performance results at that time. What changed in the last 9 months?

Marko: According to Magento2 Github repository, between 0.1.0-alpha101 I first benchmarked and what we have right now in master branch, 31.052 files changed with 2.079.084 insertions and 1.284.890 deletions

Joking aside, there are couple of areas like the new DI compiler or caching changes we can blame for most of the improvement, but it’s actually the combination of everything that went into repository this year, what made Magento 2 couple of times more performant now when compared to what I tested for my Meet Magento talk in Poland. I like to believe that my constructive critique assisted Magento 2 development team with directing some focus to performance and scalability aspect of Magento 2.

Tell me about your MageMeter.com personal project. You’ve been working on for the last few weeks. What’s the story behind it?

Marko: Yes, MageMeter.com is alive and kicking for some time now, main goal was to make it easier for Magento community to present Magento and Magento 2 performance benchmark results. While preparing my talk for Poland and Berlin, I found it difficult to visually present and compare jMeter based Magento benchmark results. At the time there was no specialized tool for the task, and doing it all using Google Spreadsheet charts required a lot of manual labour in order to aggregate all the data from CSV file, into meaningful comparison chart.

With MageMeter.com, one can simply upload CSV file produced by jMeter during benchmark, and all the data will get aggregated on upload allowing visual presentation of benchmark results in the form of bar charts, as well as up to 4-way comparison with other benchmark results already uploaded to MageMeter.com. Just what I needed couple of months ago 😉

Technical background for those interested, MageMeter.com was built with latest versions of Laravel framework in the backend, and Twitter’s Bootstrap for the responsive frontend.

Can community contribute to the project?

Marko: Of course! Although starting idea was to solve my own issue, we all know that real strength of Magento is in it’s community. That’s why I built MageMeter.com as data presentation platform for all Magento performance enthusiast, as well as hosting companies and development agencies out there. One can simply do the benchmark using official Magento Performance Toolkit, log into MageMeter.com to upload resulting CSV file, and MageMeter.com will do everything else required for quality presentation/comparison of these benchmark results on wide variety of devices. And it’ll do all that completely free of charge.

What Marko created seems to be both helpful and yet another proof that Magento has a strong community surrounding it. Using the catalog should be easy — have you tried it already?

Originally published at inchoo.net on July 29, 2015.