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Introduction
osCommerce has been around since 2000, making it the oldest of all the e-commerce platforms in this series. You will notice its age when looking at the sample data homepage (The Matrix and Unreal Tournament are hot new items for sale). Despite its age, osCommerce is still in use today; companies design and specialize in it. It’s time to put this seasoned e-commerce veteran to the test. How will it fare against modern supergiants like Magento or the new flashy WooCommerce?
If you missed our previous blog post, we are load testing six different e-commerce platforms and scoring them based on web performance. We continue our e-commerce benchmarking series by giving you a glimpse of out-of-the-box osCommerce by scoring it against the same load test standards as our out-of-the-box Magento store in the first blog post.
osCommerce Sample Homepage: Nostalgic
Like Magento and WooCommerce, osCommerce is simple to set up. The only immediate disadvantage to osCommerce is that its aesthetics are not modernized by default. There are books written on making your osCommerce store better and more appealing.
Regardless of how you decide to style your store, we’re staying on task and testing against the out-of-the-box configuration. We performed three load tests using the LoadStorm load testing tool.
Testing Phase
osCommerce Load Test Results (click to expand)
The test we score comes from first test which has the median average response time. Let’s check out the Request Connection Timeout error rates because those have the biggest impact on overall error rates.
Performance Errors
Request Connection Timed Out Errors over time
Remember, there are two factors we use for determining a store’s scalability for this series. Those two factors are the following:
- Performance errors must be below 10%
- Peak Response Time must be below 15 seconds (LoadStorm’s default timeout)
Both happen at 21 minutes, which means osCommerce can handle 2111 concurrent VUsers on a large EC2 before it fails. Great! osCommerce is the most scalable store so far; it can handle almost 800 more concurrent VUsers than its closest competitor in our series.
Unlike the other two stores, there are no 500 type errors in the test. My impression is that the older minimal user interface helped to improve the performance of the store, or perhaps their experience in e-commerce just shows.
Scoresheet
Even with relatively high scalability, osCommerce still received the lowest score out of the three environments so far. It was WebPageTest load time results that averaged out poorly and brought down this fierce competitor. Notice how the WebPageTest load time averages in this case are higher than 15 seconds. This is because WebPageTest performance tests timeout at 120 seconds (2 minutes).
Ultimately, if you’re looking for good performance, osCommerce is still worth a try. Check out our next e-commerce platform, Virtuemart, in the next part of our series.