Frequently Asked Questions

#General

#Is Accelerate Guru a Magento module?

No. Accelerate Guru is a reverse proxy — a separate process written in Rust that runs in front of your Magento server. It requires zero Magento code changes. No composer require, no setup:upgrade, no di:compile, no theme modifications. Your Magento installation is untouched.

#Does it work with Adobe Commerce (enterprise)?

Yes. Accelerate Guru works identically with Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce (Cloud and on-premises). It doesn't distinguish between them — it proxies HTTP responses regardless of the Magento edition.

#Does it work with Hyvä theme?

Yes. Hyvä stores benefit even more than Luma stores because Hyvä's lighter HTML is easier to cache and rewrite. Accelerate Guru applies specific compatibility patches for Hyvä (AlpineJS event bus, Tailwind CSS) when theme = hyva or auto detects Hyvä.

#Does it work with PWA Studio (Venia / custom)?

Yes. PWA Studio frontends serve as single-page applications that communicate with Magento via GraphQL or REST. Accelerate Guru can cache GraphQL responses (with graphql_cache = true), serve the SPA shell as a static asset, and apply compression and WAF to all traffic. Note that the HTML rewriting features (DOM optimisation, speculation rules, service worker injection) do not apply to client-side rendered frontends — but caching, compression, and security work identically.

#Does it work with third-party checkout extensions (OneStepCheckout, Aheadworks, etc.)?

Yes, for the checkout itself. Checkout paths are excluded from the page cache by default (/checkout/ is in cache_exclude_paths). The only customisation needed is to add any custom checkout URL paths to bypass_paths in [service_worker] if you use an unusual checkout URL.

#Does it replace Varnish?

Yes — and it handles everything Varnish does for Magento and more: full-page caching, ESI processing, header normalisation, backend health checks, AVIF encoding, WAF, HTML rewriting, bot detection, service worker, and the MySQL proxy.

Removing Varnish is optional. Accelerate Guru works perfectly with Varnish still installed — it sits in front of Varnish and takes over traffic routing automatically. If you decide to remove Varnish later, you lose nothing: every feature Varnish provided is already covered.

#Installation & updates

#How do I install it?

curl -fsSL https://accelerate.guru/install | sudo sh

See the installation guide for platform-specific instructions.

#How do I update it?

curl -fsSL https://accelerate.guru/install | sudo sh

The installer detects an existing installation and replaces the binary gracefully, draining in-flight requests before the old process exits. No requests are dropped.

#How do I roll back?

sudo systemctl stop accelerate-guru

Stopping Accelerate Guru causes all traffic to go directly to whatever is behind it (Magento on port 8080, or whatever you had before). Your Magento installation was never changed, so stopping the proxy is a complete rollback with zero side effects.

#Does the service start automatically after a server reboot?

Yes, when installed via the standard installer. The systemd unit is enabled with systemctl enable during installation. On macOS with Homebrew, the LaunchAgent registered by brew services start persists across reboots.

#Can I run it without root?

The binary can run as any user as long as:

1. The user can bind to ports 80 and 443 (requires CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE on Linux — set by the installer with setcap).
2. The user can read the config directory and write to the log and cache directories.

#Caching

#Does it cache pages for logged-in customers?

Yes — per-customer caching is enabled by default. Accelerate Guru identifies each logged-in customer through their session and caches pages individually per customer with a short TTL (30 seconds by default, configurable via customer_cache_ttl_secs). Product and category pages are served from cache; account, cart, and checkout pages are always bypassed.

Admin sessions (adminhtml=) always bypass the cache entirely.

Anonymous visitors are cached with the standard TTL, segmented by store view, currency, and customer group.

#What about the mini-cart and "Welcome back, [name]" header?

These are always rendered client-side by Magento's CustomerSection mechanism (the /customer/section/load AJAX call). The cached HTML for anonymous visitors shows the default state ("Log in | Register", empty cart count). After the page loads, Magento's JavaScript fetches and injects the personalised sections. This is how Magento's built-in Full Page Cache works too — Accelerate Guru follows the same convention.

#Does caching break the shopping cart?

No. Cart operations (POST /checkout/cart/add/, POST /checkout/cart/delete/, etc.) use POST requests, which are never cached. All cart modifications go directly to Magento and return session-specific responses.

#How long are pages cached?

By default, 24 hours (cache_ttl_fallback = 86400). With the MySQL proxy enabled, pages are cached indefinitely and invalidated automatically when the underlying data changes. With magento_redis integration enabled, Magento's tag-based invalidation signals are used.

#Does it work with Redis already installed for Magento?

Yes. If you already have Redis running for Magento session storage or FPC, run DragonflyDB on a different port (e.g. 6380) and set redis_port = 6380 in magento_ultra.ini. Or configure Accelerate Guru to use a different Redis database index (redis_db = 2) to avoid collision.

#DragonflyDB

#What is DragonflyDB and why is it required?

DragonflyDB is an open-source, Redis-compatible in-memory database. It is 10–25× faster than Redis under load and uses 30–40% less memory for the same data. Accelerate Guru uses it as the page cache store. Without it, caching is disabled and Accelerate Guru runs as a pass-through proxy (optimisations still work, but nothing is cached).

#Is DragonflyDB developed or owned by Accelerate Guru?

No. DragonflyDB is an independent open-source project (BSL 1.1 license) developed by DragonflyDB Inc. Accelerate Guru uses it as a caching layer because it is the best Redis-compatible store available. See dragonflydb.io for more information.

#Can I use plain Redis instead?

Yes. Point redis_host and redis_port at your Redis server. Everything works identically. You lose the throughput and memory efficiency advantages of DragonflyDB, but all other features are unaffected.

#Performance

#What server do I need to run Accelerate Guru?

Accelerate Guru is exceptionally lightweight. Because it is written in Rust with fully asynchronous I/O, a single CPU core can handle tens of thousands of simultaneous connections. On a warm cache, each request costs roughly 100–500 µs of DragonflyDB lookup time — the CPU barely registers the load.

Minimum for the edge server: 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM. A $20/month VPS handles 80,000+ cached pages per second.

Most of your RAM budget goes to DragonflyDB (the cache store), not to Accelerate Guru itself. Give DragonflyDB 60–70% of available RAM and it will hold an enormous cache without eviction.

Your Magento server's load drops dramatically after installation — typically 90–95% of all page requests are served from cache and never reach PHP. A store that previously required a powerful dedicated Magento server may find it can comfortably handle the remaining 5–10% of traffic on smaller hardware.

See the full capacity planning guide for tables with specific configurations, concurrent connection numbers, and image cache sizing.

#What score will I get on Lighthouse?

Results vary by store. Stores with slow PHP, many extensions, and many images tend to see the largest improvements. Typical results are 85–97 on mobile Lighthouse. A score below 85 after installation usually indicates large third-party JavaScript that can be addressed with delay_third_party_js = true.

#Does it help with Core Web Vitals in Google Search?

Yes. The three Core Web Vitals are LCP, INP, and CLS. Accelerate Guru directly improves all three:

• LCP — TTFB reduction + hero image preloading + AVIF encoding.
• INP — content_visibility + remove_unload_handlers + force_defer_js.
• CLS — inject_asset_dimensions eliminates image-caused layout shift.

Improvements to Core Web Vitals can positively affect Google Search ranking (Page Experience signal).

#Multi-store & domain masking

#Can I run multiple Magento stores on one instance?

Yes — this is the domain masking feature. One Accelerate Guru instance can serve unlimited hostnames, each with its own store view, language, currency, and configuration overrides. See Domain Masking.

#Can I use it for a staging environment?

Yes. Staging and development environments on .test, .local, .internal, or .dev hostnames are always free — use key = dev in the license section. There are no restrictions on features in dev/staging mode.

#Are staging domains always free?

Yes. Any hostname ending in .test, .local, .internal, .dev, or localhost uses the built-in dev license and is never counted against your production license.

#Privacy & security

#Does it log visitor IP addresses or personal data?

The WAF log records IP addresses for blocked requests. The access log can be configured to record or suppress IPs. By default, the access log does not store full request paths, query strings, or body content — only method, status code, cache hit/miss, and response time. This is the GDPR-friendly default.

To disable IP logging entirely:

[security]
log_file =   ; empty = no WAF log

#Does it support GDPR font privacy (no Google Fonts tracking)?

Yes. Enable the [optimization_fonts] section with enabled = true and backend = bunny to serve fonts through Bunny Fonts (a tracker-free, GDPR-compliant Google Fonts mirror) or self-host them directly. Visitor IPs are never sent to Google's servers.

#Is the source code available?

Accelerate Guru is commercial, closed-source software. The binary is distributed from accelerate.guru and via Homebrew. The source code is not publicly available.

#Adobe Commerce Cloud

#Does it work with Adobe Commerce Cloud?

Yes — but with an important deployment difference, because Adobe Commerce Cloud is a managed, read-only infrastructure environment. You cannot SSH in and install arbitrary binaries on an Adobe Cloud server the way you would on a VPS. The solution is straightforward:

Deploy Accelerate Guru on a separate server that you own and control, then point it at your Adobe Cloud origin.

The architecture looks like this:

Visitor
   │
   ▼
Accelerate Guru
(your VPS — same AWS/Azure region as Adobe Cloud)
   │
   │  cache misses only (~5-10% of requests)
   ▼
Adobe Commerce Cloud origin
(your Magento environment, unchanged)

Step-by-step:

1. Provision a VPS in the same cloud region as your Adobe Commerce Cloud environment.

   • If Adobe Cloud uses AWS us-east-1, choose an AWS VPS in us-east-1.
   • If Adobe Cloud is on Azure westeurope, use Azure in westeurope.
   • Low-latency private routing between the VPS and Adobe Cloud means cache misses are fast even though they cross two servers.

2. Install Accelerate Guru and DragonflyDB on the VPS using the standard installer:

   curl -fsSL https://accelerate.guru/install | sudo sh
   

3. Set upstream_addr to your Adobe Cloud origin hostname or IP:

   [server]
   upstream_addr = your-env.magento.cloud   ; or the direct IP
   upstream_port = 443
   
   [tls_ssl]
   upstream_tls = true   ; Adobe Cloud serves HTTPS
   

4. Update DNS to point your store domain to the new Accelerate Guru VPS instead of directly at Adobe Cloud.

5. Leave Adobe Cloud completely unchanged — Magento continues running normally; it just receives far fewer requests because the edge caches 90–95% of them.

#Support

#How do I get help?

• Documentation: accelerate.guru/docs
• Email: guru@accelerate.guru

Include the output of accelerate-guru check --url https://yourstore.com --verbose and your Accelerate Guru version (accelerate-guru --version) in any support request.