Grand River, a leading e-commerce developer, today announced the publication of a white paper that documents results of a series of comprehensive tests conducted to evaluate the performance of Enterprise Edition 1.10 of Magento’s open source e-commerce platform.

Grand River designed and conducted the tests to measure peak load, speed and volume – the key performance metrics of e-commerce platforms – to define peak performance and failure points of the Enterprise Edition. The findings will help retailers evaluate the Magento platform and understand the configuration requirements needed to handle holiday and other peak traffic times.

“Magento is the fastest growing e-commerce platform in the industry. Its open source architecture and ability to scale, as well as total cost of ownership and performance capability make it a ‘must include’ on the short list of any multichannel, mid-market retailer,” said Scott Robertson, partner and co-founder of Grand River. “It’s garnered the attention of e-commerce experts and firms with large online operations recently. We set out to validate the peak performance metrics that the Enterprise Edition would achieve under heavy load.”

A series of six tests was conducted using Amazon’s Elastic Cloud (EC2) environment to support the Magento Enterprise 1.10 instance. The tests were designed to measure the requirements of various server configurations, load scenarios, user simulations, page load performance and integrations and their effect on performance. A large, multichannel recreational equipment retailer served as a partner in the test. Test scenarios were based on the retailer’s performance data from their 2010 holiday season in order to replicate actual demand on e-commerce sites during peak performance periods.

The primary goals of the test were to determine the volume of orders per minute that the Magento Enterprise Edition 1.10 could support and at what point additional hardware, content delivery networks and configurations caused peaks or plateaus in performance. The target performance – 27 requests per second – was exceeded in every test scenario, including the baseline test. The platform was able to support more than 200 orders per minute under heavy loads with page load speeds at less than one second, which translates to annual online revenue of $250 million.

“We expected the platform to support these high demand performance scenarios,” said Mike Nishizawa, lead architect at Grand River, “but proved that Enterprise Edition 1.10, with Grand River’s recommended configurations on the Amazon EC2 Cloud, performed well beyond capacity expectations. With Edition 1.11 just released, Magento is a great choice for mid-market retailers with aggressive online growth plans.”

For complete results and detailed test descriptions, download the white paper here: http://thegrandriver.com/news-and-events/white-papers

About Grand River

Grand River is an industry leading e-commerce design and development company, specializing in solutions for mid-market retailers and multichannel companies. The firm’s core expertise is in the leading open source e-commerce platforms, including Magento™ Enterprise. Clients include many of the Internet Retailer Top 500 firms in retail, healthcare, technology, telecom and publishing. This year, the company was named among Michigan’s “50 Companies To Watch”, honoring second-stage firms that demonstrate high performance and innovation. Founded in 2007, Grand River has offices in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Chicago, Illinois. Call 734.913.8000 or visit http://www.thegrandriver.com to learn more.

Contacts:

Scott Robertson

Grand River

734.913.8000 x224

srobertson(at)thegrandriver(dot)com

Judy Foster

Grand River

734.913.8000 x222

jfoster(at)thegrandriver(dot)com

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