Magento: server requirements for a quite big shop to run smoothly

Question

Hi,
I'm working on a quite big magento: it will have 50 different shops (1 magento install, 1 admin to rule them all) for start, this number is expected to raise in the future, and a catalog of more than 1k products. This catalog will be shared by all shops.

I'm concerned about the server requirements I need for this to run smoothly. So far this is what I've found to get the most of it:
Caching: using magento's cache with APC, MySQL's querys
use FastCGI instead of mod_php
database clustering: I don't think it will be necesary for 1k products, what do you think?
using Zend Server

Are there other thing I can do in order to improve magento's performance? I'd like to know all I need from the beginning so I can find the right server.

thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Make sure also to use block-level caching for the sites. Beyond this, one of the suggestions that I've seen implemented is to change dynamic blocks (such as blocks that grab product data dynamically) over to statically defined HTML if they don't change often.

Once you've coded a site, tune it using YSlow and Firebug to make sure that as many files as possible are cached, and that the page size is minimized. Minimizing the number of HTTP requests to Apache will increase the capacity of your server.

Finally, enable the flat catalog and flat category functions in Magento. This will force Magento to use fewer joins when retrieving catalog data, so your database load will go down and speed will increase considerably.

Hope that helps!

Thanks, Joe