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Magento Version 2, is it just Microsoft Windows Longhorn AKA Vista?

Magento version 2 was first introduced in 2010. It is now almost halfway through 2014, and the public has not seen any alpha or beta release of Magento version 2 as of yet. The new version of Magento promised to replace PrototypeJS and Scriptaculus with jQuery as well as reorganize the database schema to remove the slow EAV tables and migrate to a bit of a flatter table structure. However, it seems that the latest updates on the direction for Magento 2 show that the database schema will not be changed much after all.

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Why Use AddThis.com Sharing Buttons

AddThis.com produces a bit of JavaScript that enables website owners to quickly and easily add social sharing buttons/links to their website. In addition to allowing users to easily share your content socially, they also provide analytics information about what content is shared via which method, giving a greater insight into visitor behavior.

However, just because it provides these benefits to websites does not necessarily mean that it is a good tool to implement on your website. If you are concerned about the performance and the total payload size for your website, then you may have some reservations about the AddThis sharing buttons. On one site I was looking at, when all of the AddThis JavaScript, CSS and Images were combined, it took up 250kB. When you consider that this is a responsive website, and many mobile users only get 300MB of data before they get to overage fees, you hope that there are other ways to implement the sharing to the major social sites.

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Always Namespace Variable Names in JavaScript

After running into a few issues with variable naming collisions over the past few days, it drives home how much we all should be namespacing our variable names in JavaScript. When writing JavaScript code that is only in use on your own website, you should still always namespace your variables. If you are writting a JavaScript library that will be in use on any website a user puts it on, namespacing your variable names is a minimum requirement.

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Avoid jQuery.bind()

When chasing down performance issues, you never know what kind of problems you will find. I was looking for something that would cause jitter when scrolling on the page. After looking at the custom code that runs on every scroll event, I still had not found a reason for the jitter. Looking at the JavaScript CPU profile when scrolling in Chrome showed that there was an overwhelming majority of the time spent in a function in the Prototype JS library.

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Improve jQuery Performance With $().addClass()

When looking at things that make a website seem sluggish, you might assume that the most popular JavaScript framework out there always does things in the most efficient manner. However, as I have found, jQuery does not always produce the best performance due to it having to support many different browsers with version 1.x. As a general rule, instead of setting CSS attributes directly on the selected nodes, I prefer to instead add and remove classes on those nodes instead, as it seems to perform much better.

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Optimizing Website Load Time

Assuming you have already done a few things to improve the page load time of your website, such as using a Varnish caching server, GZipping your content in transit, minifying that same content, and turning on all caching options that Magento or your web platform of choice have available, there is still more you can do. When it comes to website performance, the 80/20 rule definitely applies. 80% of the performance tweaks that you perform will only provide a miniscule improvement to the site load time, while the 20% of things you do make a big difference. Any time I am looking to speed of the performance of a website, I seek those 20% items that give you the biggest bang for your buck.

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Optimize Magento Time To First Byte

When looking at the performance of your site, waterfall charts are one of the first places you should investigate. The first thing that is represented on these charts is that the HTML for the website is the first resource that is downloaded every time.

As a result of being the first resource downloaded every time, this is the logical first place to look to improve the performance of your Magento website. There are a few ways to make sure that the page downloads more quickly, and they all involve making sure that the file size is as small as possible.

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Magento appending __SID to URLs

When trying to fully optimize a Magento website to run as fast as possible, I tend to opt for turning on all of the caching options in Magento, and then put the Varnish caching server in front of the web server with the Turpentine plugin. However, when you do this with some configurations, you start seeing the __SID query string parameter added to the end of the site’s url. Unfortunately, when the Turpentine plugin sees the __SID query string in the URL, it means that this page request will bypass the cache and load it directly from the server, slowing things down.

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Magento Adminhtml and Relative Links to Static Resources

Relative links in URLs allow you to only specify the path to an resource that is in the same or subfolder of the current folder. Lets say the current page you are on is http://example.com/test/ and you want to reference an image at http://example.com/test/image.jpg. You could put the full http://example.com/test/image.jpg in the src attribute of the img tag, or you could use just image.jpg instead. This works well when you are not sure what the directory path is the parent directory of your code. However, it can cause some issues when your code is moved to another location, but some resources are not moved, such as image.jpg.

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MySQL Deadlocks with Magento

One of the things that Magento, and specifically the Zend Framework provide developers is the ability to not have to think about database details as it should just handle all that for you. When it becomes obvious that there is a problem somehow with the production database getting some sort of SQL errors, its time for the developers to start caring about the implementation and architecture details of the database.

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