In part 1, we started a comparison between Magento 2 and Magento 1 in order to list what’s new in Magento 2, while comparing it to Magento 1 to put things into perspective.

We compared themes and extensions development, frontend development, and admin dashboard.In this sequel, we will explore more into the features, performance, stability, and deployment process.

Features

Magento 2 has all the features included in Magento 1, yet adds upon it many new features like:

CSS Preprocessing

Better Security

PayPal integration enhancements

More payment methods based on BrainTree

Full-Page Cache (FPC), now available for Community edition as well.

Performance, or lackthereof as we will discuss later.

Magento 2 is not an upgrade from Magento 1; it is more of a re-write so while it introduces some new features, more effort is put into Magento’s Core as we inspected earlier, so the lack of impressive new features is justified as long as no features were removed and hopefully with time new features will be added after stabilizing the product.

Performance

Releasing a re-write version of a software without adding new features is justifiable and actually expected for the first couple of releases until bugs are squashed and everything is stabilized.

However, releasing a new version of a software like Magento 2 with clear performance issues, where performance has been/is a crucial cornerstone of the software, is never acceptable and is a clear sign that the maturity of the software is badly affected.

Although the different articles list performance enhancements as a feature of Magento 2, we do realize from the experience of working with both Magento products that this is not true and, most probably, this is all just theoretical speculations.

It takes only seconds after installing Magento 2 to realize the following:

Magento 2 is more CPU hungry than Magento 1.

Magento 2 requires more housekeeping than Magento 1

Running Magento 2 in “developer” mode, which is essential during development phase, means you have to wait minutes between page loads, and you won’t even be able to spend that time doing something else as Magento will make sure to leave no resources whatsoever for your computer to be able to perform other actions in parallel.

Magento 2 is slow, like really slow, unbearably slow, not even comparable to Magento 1; we expected Magento 2 to be at least on par with Magento 1; however, this is not true, performance is much worse and pages load much slower and use much more resources.

Even in “developer” mode, which should mean that all caching is turned off, Magento 2 still utilizes some caching mechanisms to be able to perform in an acceptable manner. You have to run `setup:static-content:deploy` to deploy static content like assets, and Magento automatically caches “Dependency Injection” in var/di directory, which causes frustrations and slows down development.

These disappointments were confirmed by the various benchmarks published by other developers, as well as comments by the developers on the different forums.

Almost all benchmarks indicated that while Magento 2 uses more CPU resources than Magento 1, it is also twice as slow as Magento 1, meaning that it can serve only half the number of requests that Magento 1 can serve in the same time, all while using more CPU resources.

These benchmarks were confirmed even with caching turned on, so while Magento 2 offers Full-Page Cache (FPC) for both enterprise and community editions (Magento 1 offered FPC only for enterprise edition), and also offers integration with Varnish out-of-the-box, it is still slower even when utilizing the different caching techniques.

A detailed benchmark can be found at https://www.magecore.com/blog/news/magento-ce-1-9-vs-magento-ce-2-0-performance-comparison “Magento CE 1.9 vs Magento CE 2.0 Performance Comparison”, written by “Dima Soroka” who is the former lead Architect of the Magento project and wrote on the official blog for “MageCore” who are certified Magento Partners.

While Magento 2 supports PHP7 which normally reduces processing time by almost 50%, Magento 2 is still slower than Magento 1; however, utilizing PHP7 makes Magento 2 a bit faster and decreases the gap between Magento 2 and Magento 1.

Here is a detailed benchmark by Dima Soroka as well, https://www.magecore.com/blog/news/php-7-affects-performance-magento-1-9-ce-vs-magento-2-0-ce “How Does PHP 7 Affects Performance of Magento 1.9 CE vs. Magento 2.0 CE”

Magento 2 tries to offer better performance by offering the following tools, which while helping a lot it also adds a lot to the complexity:

Compiling of PHP files.

Merging of global assets

Indexing

Full-Page Cache

Caching of “Dependency Injection”

Caching various other items like configurations and layout

We hope that Magento team will focus on optimizing performance so that Magento 2 at least matches the performance of Magento 1 in the near future.

Stability

It is expected that a major software like Magento doesn’t go live unless bugs are squashed and proper testing is conducted; unfortunately, this was not the case in our experience.

A quick visit to Magento 2 code repository on GitHub at https://github.com/magento/magento2 reveals the amount of issues opened. We have also faced many issues ourselves although we have always used the latest stable release of Magento 2.

Some issues were critical, like the issues affecting the cache and the translations, others we have attempted to make temporary fixes for ourselves, but all in all, our developers have always been surprised by the bad quality of the code in areas with bugs.

Have a look at the release notes for the latest version of Magento 2.1 at http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.1/release-notes/ReleaseNotes2.1.0EE.html. Notice the amount of issues fixed and the known issues not fixed yet. This is obviously not an enterprise-edition software.

It is worth-mentioning that upgrading from Magento to version 2.1 was a complete failure for us; we even had to roll back to a backup of version 2.0.7 after 48 hours of downtime and different trials to fix Magento issues ourselves.

One issue was with the default Magento theme, which we built upon a customized theme. Here is an answer from Stack OverFlow pointing out the bug in the theme “Luma”, along with comments by developers who suffer from Magento 2 instability.

Deployment Process

In today’s software development world, deployment should be fully automated; it is no longer accepted to have a person dedicated to deployments, or even downtime caused by deploying a newer version of a software.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) aim at decreasing the effort and time required to push new features, enhancements, and fixes by the developers to production servers by automating the process.

Different softwares and frameworks are built with CI and CD in mind; tools and scripts are developed to make sure deployments are safe, automated, and fast.

We have easily established an automated deployment process for Magento 1 on production servers; the process simplified is the following:

Push release to code repository. Automatically trigger a script on production servers. Pull the updated files. Run modman to make sure new files are correctly linked. Clear the cache.

What’s beautiful about this process is, beside the simplicity, it takes couple of minutes and doesn’t cause downtimes, unless the code itself caused issues which should be detected by CI when running the automated tests.

We tried to devise a similar process for Magento 2, after many iterations we figured out a long process that looks something along the lines of:

Push release to code repository. Automatically trigger a script on production servers. Run `composer update` to update the different packages and since we built our extensions as composer packages which will be updated as well and this usually takes a couple of minutes. Run `setup:upgrade`; this upgrades the extensions and run any install/upgrade scripts that alter the database and/or install new extensions; this usually takes a minute. Delete some directories from the directory “var” Run `setup:di:compile`, this generates DI configuration files, which usually takes 5 minutes and can fail and cause a lot of trouble. Clear everything inside the directory pub/static. Run `setup:static-content:deploy`, which creates and deploys static content and assets for all themes, and for all locales, usually takes a whopping 20~30 minutes, shouldn’t fail but actually failed miserably when upgrading Magento to version 2.1. Re-Indexing. Flushing the cache.

The process is complicated, long and prone to failure. It causes downtime and takes on average 45 minutes.

This is definitely an unacceptable downtime; the process is overly complicated due to different caching and caching-like mechanisms like DI configuration and static-content deployment.

Conclusion

Magento 2 is definitely a great effort towards matching modern PHP frameworks, which we touched upon in different aspects and have always praised during day-to-day development.

However, Magento 2 team has a lot of challenges to tackle if they aim at staying the number 1 e-commerce solution, using and applying modern standards and technologies is an advantage; however, stability and performance are killers if not given proper focus.

At the end, we hope to see practical improvements during the coming months so as to restore our confidence in Magento being our go-to solution for e-commerce platforms which require scaling, performance, and integrations with the different systems.