Knowledge Base
Magento: "Wrong charset, conversion from `UTF-16BE' to `UTF-8' is not allowed"
We have noticed this issue cropping up with Magento. Whilst we originally assumed it was a system level fault, further testing has revealed there is an issue with the implementation of iconv() in Magento. There was a problem with Magento converting strings between character sets, specifically when creating a PDF invoice. Initial testing with a … Continue reading
Magento: Admin area stall/freeze
After noting some downtime issues recently with Magentocommerce.com - it has come to our attention that it has had a possible impact on stores. When Magentocommerce went down this afternoon - the admin area on all of our hosted stores became non-responsive. As a test, we thought perhaps the version checking facility in the admin … Continue reading
Magento: mini_sendmail and Zend_Mail incompatibility
This article is now deprecated and the issue has been resolved without changes to core code after our service change. We have recently spotted an issue after traversing our Apache sendmail application to mini_sendmail (read more about the change). In Magento's mail headers, the recipient and sender details have both the email address and respective … Continue reading
PHP: Combine and compile CSS and JS into Gzipped files
This has actually been the secret behind a lot of our great system performance, but as it was open source originally, it's going back to the people. Its a relatively straightforward script and speeds up JS and CSS performance by a huge amount, especially if you are using multiple files (like we do!). It should … Continue reading
So what makes us the fastest Magento host then ...
As we've been developing Magento sites for almost a year now, I think we can start to say we're getting proficient at the inner workings. So much so, that with our expanding hosting range - we've been tweaking our server to squeeze the best possible performance out of Magento. What looks to have been an … Continue reading