Tracking how Magento 2 stands performance wise turned out to be quite a lesson in the area of enterprise software design for us all, especially after seeing how bad Magento 2 beta 3 vs Magento 1.14.1.0 EE performance comparison chart looks like. It's not that I enjoy pointing out flaws in the work other people do, what interests me is how certain design decisions affect how well platform at hand fits the requirements and how to avoid the same pitfalls when architecting my own code. So it's true Magento 2 performed poorly when compared to Magento 1.x Enterprise Edition just couple of months ago, lets see how it performs after seeing much of Magento 2 core team resources directed into that single requirement of increased performance and scalability.
Testbed
To avoid repeating myself I'll just point out that environment used to obtain these performance benchmarks was identical to one used to conduct performance testing couple of months ago. This made it possible to present two Magento 2 versions (Beta 3 and Dev RC 8) and single Magento EE version (1.14.1.0) on the same charts, ones linked in this article. For testbed details please consult "How I tested" section of Magento 2 beta 3 vs Magento 1.14.1.0 EE performance comparison.
Benchmark results
So lets proceed straight to benchmark results. I first outline benchmark results for Magento 2 Beta 3, Magento 2 Dev RC 8 and Magento EE 1.14.1.0 without any cache, followed by results for same platforms obtained with default page cache solution and in the end with preferred page cache solution.
#1 All caches disabled
Surprisingly, Magento 2 Dev RC 8 beats Magento 2 Beta 3 with up to six times lower average time to first byte depending on particular test. And most importantly, Magento 2 Dev RC 8 beats Magento EE 1.14.1.0 without any caches in most tests.
#2 All caches enabled, Magento 2 w/ Built-In page cache, Magento Enterprise Edition w/ Full Page Cache
With default page cache solutions in place, things still look great for Magento 2 Dev RC 8. It shows huge advantage over Magento 2 Beta 3 version, and it also beats Magento EE 1.14.1.0 with FPC results by demonstrating half the average overall response time.
#3 All caches enabled, Magento 2 w/ Varnish, Magento Enterprise Edition w/ Full Page Cache
With preferred page cache solution enabled, Magento 2 Dev RC 8 is on average 6 times faster that Magento 2 Beta 3 and 3 times faster that Magento EE 1.14.1.0, this is quite a result.
Conclusion
Performance charts outlined here show that Magento 2 developers took reactions of community regarding performance and scalability of next generation Magento platform very seriously and did exceptional work with the last several releases. The only thing that troubles curious Magento architect's mind like mine is how's possible to achieve such an improvement in relatively short period of time? I'm still tracing the last several releases trying to find those couple of tweaks that made the performance improvement so dramatic, if someone has more info, I'm all ears.
Like always, if you have any thoughts or questions, comment section below is just what you need 😉
DevGenii
Seems pretty obvoius: they left optimization alone up to the lastm moment and so had a lot of low hanging fruit (cache) to pick.
@Tobias
I think you might have been right here! 🙂 But we’ll see in in the near future.