Very BAD Performance with Magento 2 on Mac OS X

[jleplomet]

Hello

Im trying to figure out how to develop a custom theme with Magento 2 and its been a huge pain so far. I have developer mode set with

bin/magento deploy:mode:set developer

The problem is that Magento takes over a minute to load any page, its almost unusable. My system specs are

Mac OS X 10.11.2
Apache 2.4.16
PHP 5.6.16 - memory_limit: 2048M
MySQL 5.6

I installed PHP/MySQL locally to avoid the virtual setup but it seems the slow performance is about the same. Is there any tips to increase page load time when set to developer mode?

[alankent]

That is very strange. Could you send me a direct email at akent at magento dot com? We are getting some reports of wildly different performance - trying to track down the common factor. E.g. my first load of home page is under 10 seconds, second load is under 1. That does not line up with over a minute for every page.

[markshust]

@jleplomet are any files hosted on an external/third-party/remote volume disk? i've noticed this can dramatically slow down m2.

[Vinai]

Have you disabled caching? What is the output of $ bin/magento cache:status?
Being used to working with (some) disabled caches on Magento 1, it was a change I had to learn to live with when developing with Magento 2. Caching should practically never be disabled.

Also, is xdebug installed in your php? You can see by running php -m | grep xdebug. If that outputs xdebug it is installed.
If so, make sure it is not enabled for every request automatically, but instead only on request.
In the PHP settings, the value for xdebug.remote_autostart has to be set to Off and xdebug.remote_mode should be req.

[bartdelvaux]

Some time ago, I was having the same issue. I could solve this by disabling the merging of Javascript and CSS.

In some cases, the generation of these files slows down the site.

[jleplomet]

I have all caches disabled for development of my theme. I have pinpointed the issue to be server side compilation of static assets. Its taking 30s-1min to finish and display the page. This happens both on frontend and admin side.

I am not using any external/third-party/remote volume disk. I have Apache, PHP/MySQL running directly on my iMac/Macbook SSD

xdebug is also installed but disabled on xdebug.remote_autostart

My solution is to enable all cache and have grunt compile less files. This seems to speed things up.

[rudik99]

I also had the same issue, the solution was the same as @bartdelvaux - disable the merging of JS and CSS.

[markshust]

@rkhoury82 this is odd, because from my experience, merging JS doesn't have any change on output? #2925

[jleplomet]

Any update to this? I cant edit layout xml files without disabling cache and therefore back at 30sec-1min page load.

[alankent]

Hi @jleplomet - which of the approaches other people have suggested have you tried? And did you send me an email as I requested? Sorry if I missed it.

Grunt is certainly the fastest approach. But it is not clear from your report how slow it is still going, and what you are doing that makes it slower than for other people. (I am not saying it is not slower, only there is not much information to work on.) Not everyone is having the same slow down as you, so 1 minute page loads is not a generic problem. So we have to work out what is different in your circumstance.

I was working with someone else - their machine was going a lot slower than expected. Never worked out why, but different people running exactly the same code were having different performance. Very hard to diagnose, but almost felt like maybe different anti-virus software or other background jobs could be kicking in (or machine thrashing etc). I was going to try the same experiments with you to try and see if we could identify the cause of the radically different results. The other person I worked with ended up with inconclusive results.

One area that has been reported to have a big impact is the number of locales. Are you developing a theme with multiple locales? If so, could you try again with a single locale and compare the speed difference.

If you have time, please send me a direct email as above - I have a Docker image I would like you to try which would guarantee identical software versions etc. I am hoping this can help identify the problem.

[markshust]

@alankent i think i have replicated this consistently with my docker images when js merging (& bundling) is turned on. i'll confirm shortly.

[alankent]

Thanks @markoshust. I guess the next question is during development, is there any need to have JS merging turned on? I would have said no, that is a production setting. Seem reasonable?

[markshust]

Yes, to be able to test in same environment as staging + production. I don't think this ticket is mac-related.

[jleplomet]

Just want to note that I do have merging turned off. My issue is mostly related to the server generating less files, and processing theme files when caching is turned of during theme development. I'm trying to edit layout files, less files, and template files.

[markshust]

@jleplomet your initial ticket was in regards to page load time, not dev building

| The problem is that Magento takes over a minute to load any page,