The simple answer is, the Extendware Full Page Cache does not need or use Varnish because Varnish is not well implemented for the Magento platform. In fact, there are two specific reasons that FPC is a much better solution for a Magento store than using the Varnish caching solution.

Reason 1: Few Database Requests and a Higher Cache Hit Rate

What is “Full Page Cache” for Magento?

We all know that patience is a virtue; unfortunately we all know that many customers do not care about waiting around for your store to load, they want it NOW! Even the smallest bug or delay causes decreased conversions and lower sales.

It is funny to think that the average customer will wait 10 minutes in line at a store, but more than 12 seconds waiting on a search online? Forget it! Frustration is at its peak!

If increasing Magento page speed is a concern to you and your business, than optimizing your Magento store with Extendware Full Page Cache can help lower your customer wait time and speed up your store loading times significantly.

This video helps explain Full Page Cache and how the Extendware Full Page Cache extension is different, more capable, and more powerful than the other competitor Full Page Cache extensions available.

Just click below to play.

Benefits of Using Extendware Full Page Cache for Magento Site Optimization

• Very Limited Database Usage – Extendware’s FPC uses a super fast primary cache so that it does not have to touch the database for over 90% of all actions.

Why does that matter? Because every time your application or store makes a call to the database, it slows down your page processing because your system has to wait for the database to respond. One call won’t make much of a difference, but a few hundred database calls every transaction can really slow down your page response time.

Our Full Page Cache gets around this by handling 90% of your requests in memory, not by calling your database, so it is much faster than how Magento’s default caching settings work. This translates into a speed similar to a Varnish caching solution, yet with a better cache hit rate, form key support, and our Full Page Cache is much easier to configure.

• High Page Cache Hit Rate – Your store will not be fast – even with a good page caching extension – if no one actually uses the cache. That is why a high cache hit rate (the percent of requests that load directly from page cache instead of the database) is important. Our cache has an excellent hit rate that far surpasses the current and previous Varnish caching solutions.
• Ability to Flush Multiple Modified Pages – Our extension gives you the ability to flush the entire page cache, flush groups of pages (all product pages, all cms pages), or flush only specific pages of an affected product. Having multiple flushing choices ensures that you don’t flush what you don’t need to, which increases your cache hit rate.
• Easy to Configure – Most stores only need to install it and enable it and it will auto-configure! It couldn’t be easier. Only more advanced use-cases or extreme customization require more involved configuration.
• Supports Product Catalog Sorting – Extendware Full Page Cache has full support for catalog sorting. Other page caches do not support changing the sort order in the catalog the way Magento does by default. As a result, it is possible for the default category sort order to be cached incorrectly when you are using other full page cache solutions. Our solution won’t incorrectly cache the default category sort order.
• Highly Configurable – The out-of-the-box solution page cache is extremely easy to configure and is very simple to just plug and play. However, that does not mean it cannot be configured to operate in different ways for many different environments. The FPC extension includes lots of configuration options so it can fit every use case and grow as your store grows!

As you can see, Extendware’s Full Page Cache increases the page load speed for your Magento website, reduces the load on the server and database and improves the ranking in search engines.

Take action and save your customers (and your wallet) valuable time. You can make your Magento website the fastest on the market and drastically improve your conversion rate and overall sales!

Full Page Cache reduces your Magento store’s First Byte Time, Increases your web server request rate, reduces database load, and makes your store much more responsive. Extendware’s Caching solution is the best Magento Caching Performance Extension you can buy to speed up your store and easily pays for itself by saving you money rather than buying expensive hardware solutions to increase your Magento store optimization rates.

Why is a Fast Store Important?

The answer is simple: Money. Yes, I said it. You are in business to make a living as well as provide a valuable service to people. Both of those things are helped by having a faster Magento store. Here, let me explain:

1. Increase conversion rates – There has been a lot of research into store speed and conversion rates from Amazon, Walmart, and other big retailers. It has been discovered that there is a direct correlation between speed and sales. Conceptually it is easy to understand… If you provide a better experience, then people will order more.
2. Increase search engine rankings – Google caught onto the whole Speed == Quality. If customers purchase more and have a better experience on faster stores, then it only makes sense that Google will be providing a better service by to its customers by redirecting them to higher quality stores. As a result, Google now makes store speed as a ranking faster. The math is simple: The faster your store, the higher your search engine rankings.
3. Provide a better experience – Ultimately, it comes down to the experience and value you want to provide your customers. If you provide a fast experience they will be less irritated and find you store easier to use. This builds loyalty and reduces friction to order from your store.

What are the Components of Store Speed?

It’s really quite. There are only two aspects of Magento speed that are relevant:

Generation time

This is how fast your server can put together your page and serve it up to the user. There are some other factors that can influence this such as network latency, but in general, the dominant factor is your servers ability to serve pages. This aspect of store performance is crucial as it affects every page and it is very important for SEO.

Download time

Once your base HTML page is generated and served, then the client browser must begin to download all the resources it references. This is your Javascript, CSS, and Images. The process of downloading these resources can take a while depending on their size and structure.

The Solution

I get it. You have a business to run. You don’t want to know about all this technical stuff. What you want is an awesome solution to speed up your Magento store in an easy way. The solution is very simple and it will speed up both generation time and download time:

Generation Time Enhancers

1. Full Page Cache – Cache your HTML pages so they can generate very, very fast.
2. Cache Warmer – Crawler your store to ensure the pages are cached.

Download time enhancers

1. Minify Javascript / Css – Make your javascript / css/ HTML smaller and faster to download.
2. Image Optimization – Optimize store images so they can be downloaded faster and reduce bandwidth.

It’s that simple. Speed up both aspects of slowdowns and have the fastest store possible. Contact us for any questions!

Use Extendware Page Cache

The Magento Full Page Cache extension by Extendware will reduce load on the database and server load and improve First Byte Time. The result is a much faster and more stable store. For most Magento stores this speed tip will provide the single fastest improvement in Magento speed.

Minify Javascript / CSS / HTML

Once the First Byte Time is super fast you will want to ensure the Download Time is fast. This is another component of Magento page load. To do this you will want to use the Minify JS / CSS extension which will reduce the size of javascript / css and HTML pages. In addition, it can improve browser caching, do pre-compression and a lot more.

Optimize Images

Very few stores are optimizing images which is quite important considering that images change on every page load. This means that the browser cache is not effectively used. So, though a small improvement on a per-page basis it produces a large speed benefit in aggregate. The easiest way to optimize images is with the Image Optimizatoin extension.

Enable Flat Catalog in Magento

The bottleneck of Magento is almost always the database. To improve the speed of database reads you should use enable Flat Catalog in magento under System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Frontend. This will reduce the number of database joins done when showing products and as a result reduce MySQL query complexity. The end result is more speed.

Optimize MySQL Configuration

Many stores run MySQL configurations that are not optimized for Magento. Magento use a lot of indexes and a lot of joins. As a result, it will need adequate memory for both of these activities.

Enable Magento Cache

Magento has an internal cache for its configuration, layouts, and blocks. Some stores forget to enable this, so ensure that this is enabled in System -> Cache Management.

Remove 3rd Party Extensions

If you are using extensions that were not created by Extendware, then you will want to disable them. About 50% of all store performance issues are caused by poorly created extensions. When possible you will want to use Extendware extensions as they created with performance in mind.

Enable System Compilation

Magento can combine the PHP files of your store, so that it uses less disk access. This is called System Compilation and can be important if you do not use an opcode cache or you are not on SSD disks. To enable this you can go to System -> Tools -> Compilation.

Review your Hosting Provider

Many hosting companies are oversold and do not offer good performance for the money. In addition, some are just not compatible with Magento. For example, Siteground is a poor choice for Magento hosting as its limitations are too restrictive to run a well-run Magento store. Choosing a better host will help your business reach the next level.

Use a PHP OpCode Cache

A PHP OpCode Cache such as APC can speed up the loading of the PHP files which results in an improved Magento Store speed. This is especially important if you are not using hosting with SSD disks.

To resolve this is fairly simple. All you need to do is edit the file [Magento root]/lib/Zend/Cache/Backend/Memcached.php and replace the getFillingPercentage() method with the below:

public function getFillingPercentage()
    {
        $mems = $this->_memcache->getExtendedStats();

        $memSize = null;
        $memUsed = null;
        foreach ($mems as $key => $mem) {
            if ($mem === false) {
                $this->_log('can\'t get stat from ' . $key);
                continue;
            }

            $eachSize = $mem['limit_maxbytes'];
            $eachUsed = $mem['bytes'];
            if ($eachUsed > $eachSize) {
                $eachUsed = $eachSize;
            }

            $memSize += $eachSize;
            $memUsed += $eachUsed;
        }

        if ($memSize === null or $memUsed === null) {
			$mem = $this->_memcache->getstats();
			if (isset($mem['bytes']) and $mem['limit_maxbytes'] > 0) {
				return ((int) (100 * ($mem['bytes'] / $mem['limit_maxbytes'])));
			}
        } else {
        	return ((int) (100. * ($memUsed / $memSize)));
        }

        return 100;
    }

What exactly does this do?

It will make an additional attempt to get the filling percentage and if it cannot determine the filling percentage then 100 is returned which indicates it is full. In this way there will not be an exception thrown during the temporary periods when filling percentage cannot be determined.

Quick Extension Overview

What exactly is First Byte Time (FBT)?

First Byte Time is one aspect of load time. Load time = First Byte Time + Download Time. In general, a First Byte Time is dependent on how fast your hosting platform is and the size of your Magento store. In addition, some extensions can slow First Byte Time. As bottlenecks increase the First Byte Time will also increase. In Magento the primary bottleneck is the database and in general waiting for the database is what causes most of the slow speed.

How can First Byte Time be improved?

The easiest way to improve First Byte Time is to use our Magento Full Page Cache. With our extension, the FBT can be drastically reduced. In some cases by as much as 100x. The page cache works by reducing load on the database and reducing processing of the page generation. The end result is a faster site and reduced server load.

Features of Extendware Page Cache?

The Extendware Full Page Cache is the fastest and most flexible page cache available for Magento. It even outperforms the Magento Enterprise Cache. It does this because it is multi-leveled. The primary cache does not even require sessions or database. The secondary cache supports advanced hole punches for dynamic content. The end result is the fastest store possible. Review the product page for a full list of features.

Extendware offers an array of performance extensions that affect different aspects of performance. Review all our Magento extensions to improve your store even more.

Multi-Level Cache Backends – Do you want to use a fast memory based cache such as memcached / apc / xcache but you do not have enough memory to store the whole site in memory? Or, perhaps you need tagging support? Multi-level cache backends will come to your rescue. It allows hybrid caches such as a Memcached / File hybrid that gives you the benefit of a memory based backend with the large storage capabilities of the File backend. In addition, it will give Tagging support for memcached / apc / xcache.

Faster Secondary Cache – The secondary cache is the cache-level that displays dynamic content such as cart contents when using the full page cache. The latest page cache includes important changes to the secondary cache that allows it to be 2-3 times faster than it was before and further reduces database queries.

Quick Overview

However, crawling is not a complete solution because it is not sufficiently real-time. Auto-flushing / tagging is the complete solution as it will delete affected pages after a product / category changes. With our tagging addon you can select the tagging level and auto-flushing events that will trigger the flushing of specific pages. This provides maximum flexibility and ensures content freshness for your store. Refer to the Extendware Magento Full Page Cache (FPC) product page for more information.