Hjdcti

I recently started developing on magento2 new extensions or customizations, and my first impression was a nightmare. I have to wait about 20-30s for every change I make? really?

I'm talking about development mode, I know that in production with cache enabled and other things the website can be smooth. But when I'm working with an extension or layout problem I need to be removing static files, clearing cache, etc.

My question is, how you all M2 developers work? because I don't believe you have to wait 20s-30s for refreshing the page...

My environment: My pc is "good" i5 with 8gb RAM. I need to work with Windows so I use vagrant:

• Use of all 4 cores CPU


• Use 5120MB of RAM


• Ubuntu/trusty64 - Ubuntu 14.04


• PHP Version 7.0.12-1+deb.sury.org~trusty+1


• MariaDB - 10.1.18-MariaDB-1~trusty


• Magento 2.1.2 is installed only with sampledata (no more modules are installed)


• (Ask me if you wanna know sth more)

What is happenning exactly?
Usually M2 responds okay, slow but okay, about 5-10s to load the pages, but sometimes (more usually than sometimes) it just stucks forever! sometimes is the first page and sometimes are the css,js,html files but always the problem is with TTFB.

I saw a problem going to setup wizard too... with angular.js these files lasts forever...

These 2 pictures are about navigating inside setup wizard.

Then another one navigating on frontend catalog:

What am I asking exactly?
Is this normal? you guys work with this timing? I commented this with some colleagues and we just don't believe, I have to be working like this? I sometimes despair of waiting all the time watching the screen...

If someone asks me for show him a test, like creating a new product or something like that he just freaks out... Creating a new order, filling the fields and every field executes a js that lasts for 5-6s...

I don't know but I feel so bad developing with this stuff...

I tried everything and the only thing it works is the virtual machine that provides bitnami. https://bitnami.com/stack/magento/virtual-machine

Seriously, I don't know what has this vm, but goes really fast. I tried creating my VM using a fresh installation of Ubuntu, CentOS, etc. But no works so fine like this VM.

disable CSS/JS merging and minifying:

Stores > Configuration > CSS Settings (Javascript Settings) > Merge CSS (Merge JS) > NO

Stores > Configuration > CSS Settings (Javascript Settings) > Minify CSS (Minify JS) > NO

Also see this guide on how to improve Magento 2 performance.

Suggestions from Magento posted after this question was answered. Reading other answers I think this information could be a helpful addition

http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.2/extension-dev-guide/build/optimal-dev-environment.html

Optimal Configuration

The following is a list of optimizations you can make on your local development machine

• Magento recommends installing and using the latest supported version
  of PHP 7 to increase performance.


• Replace your MySQL database with
  Percona.


• Make sure you install and enable PHP OPcache.


• Xdebug is off by default. Enable this feature only when you need it because it requires a lot of memory and degrades performance. The xdebug.max_nesting_level configuration needs to be set to 200 or greater for Magento. You can increase the memory available to PHP to get an increase in performance with Xdebug on.


• If you need sample data, you can install it using composer or by cloning repositories.


• To speed up front end development, turn off merging of CSS and JavaScript.


• Make sure caching is turned on (this is the default behavior). Generally, only page cache and block cache should be turned off for development and turned back on when testing.


• Opcache timestamp validation should always be on for development. Development is impossible with opcache on and revalidation off because any PHP modification would require a cache reset.

I found that developer mode disable everything - which was overkill. There's certain aspects I do wish to cache, such as translation. Thankfully in env.php you can still set which caches to use specifically:

'cache_types' => 
 array (
 'config' => 1,
 'layout' => 0,
 'block_html' => 0,
 'collections' => 1,
 'reflection' => 1,
 'db_ddl' => 0,
 'eav' => 1,
 'customer_notification' => 1,
 'target_rule' => 1,
 'full_page' => 0,
 'config_integration' => 1,
 'config_integration_api' => 1,
 'translate' => 1,
 'config_webservice' => 1,
 'compiled_config' => 1,
 ),

This was the above that I chose to cache whilst developing on the Checkout, as this was heavily front-end. I chose to not cache Layout; Blocks and Full page to see my changes.

Turn on your cache.

Go to <your magento 2 directory>/bin and run this command magento cache:enable.

Clean the cache when you edit the frontend to see what you've edited.

Go to <your magento 2 directory>/bin and run this command magento cache:clean.

My Reference

I'm new to magento 2 too. I hope someone has a way to make magento 2 fast even when the cache is disabled.