Everything is set on a dedicated server (no cpanel, overcomplicated panels – just pure lamp on centos without even email or DNS; we use godaddy and google for those 2 things).

The server is a quad core with 8Gb of RAM and properly tunned for performance with apc-cache and the only thing we are hosting is a magento install for all those 40 domains (shops).

We haven’t added any plugins/features to magento. It’s basically the out of box thing, with a very simple theme added to it.

We have tried all kind of performance tuning and this the best we achieved.

I must admit if people are just browsing the website, it loads very quickly. But the problem is when we update products and orders. It takes about 2 minutes to save a product and it eats 120% of the CPU and 10% from the memory.

Our products are scrapped from other websites, so we need to do regular product updates and let me just tell you that using the dataflow is the fastest way to import products, but even that takes about 1 hour and 10 minutes to process 500 products. So when we have to do batch updates for 11,000 we have to wait endless hours.

If you’re thinking about using magento for your shop, it’s ok, but make sure to have a dedicated server and don’t even try to have more than 10,000 products or a multi-shop. It just doesn’t work.

MAGENTO is simply NOT scalable in performance.