A Shopware store goes from smooth to sluggish—pages take 10 seconds to load, even longer in some cases. What happened? In this post, we tell the true story of how one overlooked plugin setting nearly collapsed a storefront, and how it was resolved using native tools. If you’re shipping code in Shopware without clear performance observability, this is your wake-up call.
Everything was working, until it wasn’t. A Shopware store that had been running smoothly for weeks began to show signs of severe slowdown. Pages that once loaded in under a second were now taking 10, 15, sometimes even 180 seconds to render. The business owner assumed it was a traffic spike or a temporary hosting issue. It wasn’t.
When our team investigated, we discovered the cause: a single plugin was quietly dragging the entire storefront down.
The culprit: a misconfigured plugin
The PayPal plugin had been left with debug logging enabled in production. What seemed like an innocuous setting was generating thousands of log entries per hour, saturating disk I/O and delaying responses across the board.
The plugin itself wasn’t broken, but its configuration created a bottleneck that rippled through the system.
Once debug logging was disabled and log files rotated, response times returned to normal. The store recovered. But for several days, customers experienced delays, and sales were lost.
This isn’t an edge case
We’ve seen many similar scenarios:
- A plugin update introduces an unbounded loop on checkout.
- A category page is configured to list thousands of products without pagination.
- ERP syncs trigger constant cache invalidations during peak traffic.
- Admin users leave verbose logging enabled across multiple services.
Each of these starts small and gradually builds pressure until something breaks.
Prevention is a process
Crisis recovery is valuable, but early detection and prevention are better. Here's how we recommend thinking about Shopware performance:
- Observe system behaviour continuously: look for trends in latency, CPU usage, and cache misses.
- Profile changes regularly, even when no issues are visible.
- Review all plugin configurations before going live or after any update.
- Prewarm your caches to avoid cold start scenarios.
- Simulate traffic before campaigns, not during them.
Our full white paper covers these scenarios and more
In our newly released white paper, we document:
- Real load testing across seven infrastructure tiers.
- Cache invalidation patterns and mitigation strategies.
- Profiling tools and analysis techniques.
- Lessons learned from customer deployments.
- Best practices for Shopware performance, from dev to production.
