Category Archives: php

Magento Catalog Search XSS on Some Themes

We’ve seen a few customers failing PCI scans due to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the catalogsearch page. Initially it seemed like it was a bug in Magento where it wasn’t sanitizing its input but when we tried to … Continue reading

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Optimizing APC Cache Settings for Magento

APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is an opcode cache for PHP that works very well to speed up page loads when used on servers running Magento. There are many opcode caches available (APC, accelerator, xcache, etc) which can be used with … Continue reading

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Diagnosing MySQL Performance Bottlenecks With Maatkit

Hello again! Last time we looked at optimizing performance of web apps, we were checking out how to diagnose PHP performance bottlenecks using XDebug to generate valgrind-style logs of what PHP was doing. While that can be immensely useful in … Continue reading

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Diagnosing slow PHP execution with Xdebug and KCachegrind

Tracking down a performance issue to the actual PHP app can be hard enough by itself, but what do you do once you’re sure that the app itself is the bottleneck? The excellent Xdebug extension has many useful features for … Continue reading

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Upgrading to Magento 1.4.2.0

The latest stable version of magento, version 1.4.2.0, was released on December 8th. Upgrading Magento Community Edition always poses some problem or another, mostly due to user-customized themes and third-party extensions. However, upgrading from a vanilla 1.4.1.x install does generate … Continue reading

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Configuring Memcached in Magento 1.4

In the Magento 1.4 release, the memcached backend configuration has changed. There are now more options listed than in previous Magento versions. Some confusion has resulted in how to configure memcached in this new version as the previous configuration for … Continue reading

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Scripting Magento

There are times when the web-based administration of Magento hits a snag and no longer works as quickly as we’d like it to. Perhaps product exports or backups time out, or refreshing the URL rewrite table seems to run for … Continue reading

Posted in Linux, Magento, php | 1 Comment

Increase WordPress performance with WPSuperCache

Last week, we covered speeding up WordPress with Memcache, which was simple enough, but most shared hosting plans don’t allow you to run memcached. Even if you are allowed to run the memcache daemon on your server and you have … Continue reading

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Handle More Traffic in WordPress with Memcache

Memcache is a High-performance, distributed object caching system. WordPress is a great piece of blogging / CMS software. If you’re running a WordPress site and you’re having growing pains, you can combine the two to handle increased traffic and, more … Continue reading

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Finding the status of Magento cron jobs / tasks

As covered in our last article, you should have a “cron job” (crontab) set up to run Magento’s cron.php file every so often (15 minutes or so is fine) via PHP directly on the server to take care of housekeeping … Continue reading

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