Magento Performance Optimization meet up was a huge success.  It was my pleasure meeting everyone who came to the event.  We shared some pointers on how to optimize Magento for better performance. Here are the details from the presentation we went over yesterday. 

NOTE: DO NOT TRY THIS ON A PRODUCTION SITE WITHOUT PROPER TESTING FIRST. THESE TIPS MAY BREAK YOUR SITE; IF IT DOES, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE RESTORE PLAN. THESE TIPS ARE GIVEN AS IS WITH NO GUARANTEE.   

MAGENTO WEB HOSTING

To run Magento smoothly cheap web hosting is not good enough.  There are probably many great hosting companies out there but here are four that I know of is great for Magento. They are experts in Magento Hosting and their servers are optimized for Magento. Without a good hosting your Magento site will not perform well. Below are four Magento specialized hosting company I highly recommend the following web hosting companies for Magento.

Aspiration Web Hosting - is a stable and profitable business that was founded in April 2008 and has no intentions of selling anytime soon. We specialize in high-performance hosting solutions with our main focus on Magento Hosting as well as other PHP Applications like SimpleMachines Forum (SMF), WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. visit hosting company website

Web Server Optimization's

Enable Keep Alive:  

To learn more on how to enable keep alive in Apache Web Server visit here  and here) 

How  to optimize Zend Server 

1. NginX - is an advanced Internet infrastructure software. It is a high performance web server with the lowest memory footprint and a complete combination of the most essential features to build modern and efficient web infrastructure.

   NGINX functionality includes HTTP web server, HTTP and mail reverse proxy, content caching, load balancing, compression, bandwidth policing, connection multiplexing and reuse, SSL offload and HTTP media streaming.

2. Lighttpd - Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility -- all of these describe lighttpd (pron. lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it's Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.
3. LiteSpeed - LiteSpeed Web Server is the leading high-performance, high-scalability web server. It is completely Apache interchangeable so LiteSpeed Web Server can quickly replace a major bottleneck in your existing web delivery platform. With its comprehensive range of features and easy-to-use web administration console, LiteSpeed Web Server can help you conquer the challenges of deploying an effective web serving architecture.
   
   LiteSpeed Web Server has superior performance in terms of both raw speed and scalability. Our benchmarks demonstrate that it is more than 6 times faster than Apache. When serving static content, LiteSpeed surpasses well-respected content accelerators including thttpd, boa and TUX. When it comes to dynamic content, LiteSpeed is more than 50% faster in PHP content delivery than Apache with mod_php. Don't just take our word for it. Download the LiteSpeed free or trial version and experience it for yourself.
4. Zend Server - Zend Server Community Edition is a fast and reliable PHP application stack. It is completely free, and you can use it in development, testing and production. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and IBM i are supported.

Keeping your Magento website optimized

1. Remove all unnecessary files from your hosting account
2. Do not use hosting as storage space
3. Repair and then optimize all tables in database 
4. Use a PHP accelerator like APC, ZendOptimizer+ or Xcache
5. Only install necessary Apache modules
6. Use Apache mod_expires and be sure to set how long files should be cached
7. Enable Gzip Compression in htaccess
8. Compress output, use zlib.output_compression or mod_deflate 
9. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) 
10. Set ‘php_value memory_limit 128M’ or more in your php configuration 
11. Use a memory-based file system for dynamic data
12. Optimize you image
13. Use CSS Sprites
14. Minify  css
15. Minify  javascript
16. Keep your code clean – remove unnecessary code
17. Minimize Javascript use
18. Use a lightweight template as a basis for your template
19. Apply Javascript Lazy Loader for prototype
20. Uninstall unused extensions
21. Disable unused Modules
22. Enable Compilation 
23. Merge CSS
24. Merge Javascript
25. Disable Logging 
26. Enable cache
27. Enable Flat Catalogue 
28. Disable layered navigation if not used or add on selected pages
29. Disable Stores
30. Don’t  show all products in one page use paging
31. Make sure website is W3C Compliant
32. Use SSL only on pages needed
33. Attribute Settings
34. Keep Magento up to date by upgrading to latest stable version
35. Get Magento Optimized Hosting       

Performance Resources —

1. Magento Speed Test  (by Ashley Schroder) —: 

   Magento Speed Test runs a short performance test on your Magento ecommerce website and automates performance monitoring. The tool being used is Siege as described in my Magento performance testing article.

2. Run your site through Website Optimization—
3. An informative article in Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Use Google Page Speed Firefox extension  

Other Magento Performance Optimization Articles :

• 101 ways to speed up your magento eCommerce website
• Optimizing your web stack performance for magento Magento WKi
• Performance is key notes on magentos performance Magento Blog
• Magento performance hosting Yoast.com