Magento Community Edition (CE) 1.8 and Enterprise Edition (EE) 1.13 Documentation Home

Welcome

Welcome to the documentation home page for the Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) 1.13 and Community Edition (CE) 1.8 releases! Let's start out by telling you a little bit about them.

Magento recognizes that merchants and systems integrators require higher performance in key areas—such as product search, product browsing, and checkout. Merchants and integrators are now commonly coming to Magento with:

• Large databases (that is, more than one million products)
• Heavy traffic volume
• Frequent merchandising updates
• Extensive marketing and promotion campaigns
• Many web stores to address their customers' needs

To address these ever-growing needs, Magento systematically examined performance and scalability characteristics. Our engineers continually measured performance on a range of environments and use cases to identify and remove bottlenecks, and then conducted extensive testing to confirm improvements.

We characterized performance based on variations in deployment and business configurations to ensure improvement for a range of merchant sizes and configurations.

In this release, we focused primarily on improvements to indexing, tax calculations, caching, and checkout performance.

We're excited about the changes you'll find, including:

• Reindexing (Enterprise Edition only):
  • Most indexing processes now run only to update products, categories, URL redirects, and so on that have changed—eliminating the need for manual full reindexing
  • Your Magento web store is not locked at any point during reindexing
  • Reindexing is now a background process.
• Caching (Enterprise Edition only):
  • Full page caching now invalidates only pages that are affected by product or category changes
  • Improved cache adapter for single-host systems
  • Additional option of using Redis NoSQL for cache and session storage in multi-host deployments (recommended for new deployments)
• EE customers also get detailed performance and tuning guidelines geared toward enterprise installations
• Sales, Value Added, and Fixed Product Tax calculations (Magento CE and EE):
  • Major improvements in the way sales tax is calculated.
• Checkout performance (Magento CE and EE) achieved by:
  • Eliminating unnecessary calls to gift wrapping when loading the Shipping Method checkout step
  • Eliminating unnecessary RSS cache cleanups when RSS functionality is disabled
  • Eliminating unnecessary calls to the translation module when sending new order e-mails if the current locale is the same as the locale set in Magento
  • Improving the overall checkout process performance by loading the information for the current checkout step only
  • Improving the overall checkout process performance by loading the progress information for the current checkout step only