PHP accelerators and Magento

Our PHP 5.3 app includes its own .htaccess file. Magento overwrites that with its own, and I think that the performance issues you saw are related to that.

With that in mind, I just did my own installation of the Magento with the following steps, and didn't notice any performance issues (except where noted):

Control panel steps:

1. Create a new Static/CGI/PHP-5.3 app in the control panel, named "magento".
2. Create a new Static-only symlink app in the control panel, named "magent_media" and using "/home/username/webapps/magento/media" in the extra info field (be sure to change "username" to your username).
3. Create a new site in the control panel with the "magento" app on URL path "/" and the "magento_media" app on URL path "/media". Make a note of the domain you assigned to the site, eg "yourdomain.com"
4. SSH into the server and run the following commands:

SSH steps

cd ~/webapps/magento
wget --referer=http://www.magentocommerce.com/download http://www.magentocommerce.com/getmagento/1.5.1.0/magento-1.5.1.0.tar.bz2
wget --referer=http://www.magentocommerce.com/download http://www.magentocommerce.com/getmagento/1.2.0/magento-sample-data-1.2.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf magento-1.5.1.0.tar.bz2 --strip 1
tar xjf magento-sample-data-1.2.0.tar.bz2 --strip 1
mysql -u databasename databasename -p < magento_sample_data_for_1.2.0.sql

Enter your database password when prompted, and wait a bit while the sample data loads. This is the only step that seemed to take a long time.

Finally, edit ~/webapps/magento/.htaccess and add the following two lines to the top:

Action php53-cgi /php53.cgi
AddHandler php53-cgi .php

Once you've done that, you can go to your site's domain, eg http://yourdomain.com, to complete the Magento setup process.

When everything is finished, Magento's scripts will be served correctly via PHP 5.3, and your Magento media will be served by the front-end Nginx server (which can make a huge improvement in the performance of your site).

eAccelerator is no longer installed on any of our servers due to an incomparability between the versions of it and PHP we use. If you want a PHP accelerator you'll need to install PHP, Apache and whichever accelerator you like.

Incidentally, when I installed Magento I had to do it via the command line. The web installer timed out, leaving an uncompletable install. When I did it via the command line I thought it was broken too, it took about 15 minutes to run the command, with no progress or feedback. Eventually the prompt returned and it had completed successfully.

Seems like PHP and/or MySQL is really slow here?

That doesn't sound right at all. We have a lot of users running Magento (and far more running regular PHP/MySQL) all without issue.

Could you point us to the domain where this is happening (or open a support ticket if you don't want to give this out).