You need to be more responsible with your code!

Sometimes I research nonsense at my job. Sure, it’s within my area of responsibility. But guys, this is e-commerce, not your blogs, landing pages, etc! You should be more responsible with your code!

So, one day a client’s store built on Magento (now Adobe Commerce) critically dropped in performance. Surprisingly, the performance dropped only on the backend, not on the frontend (here I should clarify that by backend I mean the admin panel where managers process orders, and by frontend I mean the product catalog and shopping cart). As a result, his management team can’t handle orders, customers, etc.

How can this be fixed? Usually, site slowdown happens when we have a bottleneck, for example, the database is processing a lot of heavy queries. I disabled almost all extensions that generate MySQL DB queries, collected query statistics, checked the last modified files, but nothing!

Thanks to Magento developers for the built-in Profiler. I use it and get an unambiguous result – performance drops due to external requests to the third-party server from the extension. And why? Yes simply requests for license verification! Really?

Of course, this license server is down – maybe they were shut down or something. In any case, the client server is trying to get a response from the down server, which is what caused the performance degradation.