MM4 with OpenUI and OpenXB

[Justin Higgins]

Does anyone else have experience running OpenXB? I tried searching and haven't seen any other posts. I have a site with a few categories and products but very high peaks in traffic and order volume. I already have static pages for the frontpage and the categories of the store, but having the individual product pages and basket/checkout through Miva. Currently I am working on setting up an OpenXB compliant web server and test OpenXB. What my question is then, can I add more web servers for the store to connect to a single MySQL server through OpenXB? Has anyone tried to serve this type of load on MM4? Thanks, Justin

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: MM4 with OpenUI and OpenXB

I would stay away from OpenXB, it will not increase the performance, rather the opposite; its benefit is in running Merchant 4 stores that have such a large number of products that the dbase database system is the limiting factor, or to those who must run Merchant 4 but want to hook third party apps into the database. It can be load balanced to an extent but that gets very messy since you need to worry about replication of the pieces that still reside on the file system along with worrying about the modules that are incompatible with it or that still use the standard databases even with openxb in place since those would no longer be usable.

Best bet for high traffic MM4 stores is Merchant Optimizer to make static pages of everything.

[Justin Higgins]

Re: MM4 with OpenUI and OpenXB

David, Thanks for the quick reply. Supposing that the third party modules can work, wouldn't OpenXB at least speed up the sessions and basket dbase files without needing to constantly pack data files? I agree that managing multiple store fronts in a load balanced scenario would be a challenge as well. I was more hoping that if one beefy server still isn't enough, we have somewhere to add more capacity, instead of hitting a ceiling and telling the client sorry - nothing more we can do. Justin

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: MM4 with OpenUI and OpenXB

If you are trying to accomodate traffic, then Optimizer is possibly the best investment. (Along with having a decent host to begin with.) We have one client (on David's servers) that got a front page placement on yahoo at Christmas. Traffic peaked somewhere around 250,000 visitors a minute...translating to about 200 orders per hour, and the server ran fine. (And this is a non-compiled site.)

[Justin Higgins]

Re: MM4 with OpenUI and OpenXB

Bruce, Thanks for your input. The site is going to be indirectly publicized on every media outlet in the US at times, so we are thinking super bowl type ad type traffic spikes. So Optimizer seems like the best thing we can do. We couldn't get OpenXB even running and support is non existent now. We are the host and we can handle the overall traffic, it is just having everything on one box without the ability to spread the load that scares me. Justin

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: MM4 with OpenUI and OpenXB

David, Thanks for the quick reply. Supposing that the third party modules can work, wouldn't OpenXB at least speed up the sessions and basket dbase files without needing to constantly pack data files? I agree that managing multiple store fronts in a load balanced scenario would be a challenge as well. I was more hoping that if one beefy server still isn't enough, we have somewhere to add more capacity, instead of hitting a ceiling and telling the client sorry - nothing more we can do. Justin

In theory yes, but in reality no. :) I think we're the only host who had OpenXB as a bundled option so we have worked with it quite a bit and still have customers using it and the performance gains just didn't materialize unless the store has only one or two modules and the manner in which they work lend themselves to working well in an OpenXB environment.

Is there a reason you're not using Merchant 5? Optimizer would still be the best option for huge traffic but Merchant 5 definitely has fewer caveats if you try to load balance it.

[Justin Higgins]

Re: MM4 with OpenUI and OpenXB

We didn't design the site, we are just trying to make it work (well). Upgrading to MM5 is definitely one of our suggestions to our client, but their familiarity is with OUI and some modules that hook into OUI.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: MM4 with OpenUI and OpenXB

Sounds like Optimizer will be the ticket. Remember though, you are still going to have to handle order traffic through Merchant, so streamlining that process will pay in the long run. This might include things like limiting extra features in the order process such as coupons, upsells, using OpenTokens to provide features such as thumbnails in the basket, etc. and of course, remove (if not using standard merchant cat-tree) the category tree from those pages.

[Dyna Jim]

Re: MM4 with OpenUI and OpenXB

Be careful with MO and openxb. I've had problems getting merchant optimizer to work on my MM4 OpenXB store for a while now.
My original version of Mechant optimizer would work, but due to quanity of products (over 200,000) it would time out. When the upgrade came out I purchased it, and overwote the original. The upgrade never worked, so I asked for a original version which is somewhat different than my original. This still doesn't work.


Jim