Magento Open Source 2.1.6 Release Notes

• Highlights
• Functional fixes and enhancements
  • Catalog
  • Configurable products
  • Indexers
  • Import
  • Miscellaneous
  • Swatches
• System requirements
• Install the Magento software
• Upgrade from an earlier version
• Migration toolkits
• Credits

Release notes updated on April 28, 2017.

We are pleased to present Magento Open Source (formerly Community Edition) 2.1.6. This release includes important performance enhancements for your Magento installation, especially for operations that involve the category page as well as image resizing.

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Highlights

Magento 2.1.6 contains over 15 significant performance enhancements when compared to 2.1.5. Look for the following highlights in this release:

• Improved performance of the Category page

  • loading configurable products from the database is now up to 5x faster

  • price calculations are now up to 3-5% faster

  • stock validation is now up to 20% faster

• Optimized image resizing

  • image resize operations performed from the command line interface now generate images of all sizes. See magento catalog:images:resize for more information.

  • image resize operations from the Admin have been fixed

  • significant decrease in the number of file system operations when processing images on frontend

  • caching of image metadata is up to 50% faster, depending on store size

• Improved performance of layered navigation

  • layered navigation is now up to 3% faster due to the caching of attribute options

• Minimized indexing operations after product import

Functional fixes and enhancements

We address the following functional fixes and enhancements in this release.

Catalog

• Magento no longer locks the category_product_entity table. Unlocking this table reduces the potential of lock-related timeouts that can occur when indexing and checkout operations run in parallel. Previously, Magento locked the category_product_entity table.

• The storefront now displays images that Magento resizes during product save operations, rather than resizing the product on the storefront. Previously, the image path contained store_id, and during save operations, Magento resized images for images the default store only.

• The \Magento\CatalogInventory\Model\Stock\Status\getStockId() method now returns the correct values.

• The \Magento\CatalogInventory\Model\Stock\Status\getStockId() method now returns the correct values.

Configurable products

• The check that Magento runs to confirm a configurable product’s readiness for sale is now faster. (The isSalable method checks that a configurable product can be sold (that is, is in a saleable state)).

• Magento no longer calculates configurable product special prices on the category page. Previously, Magento calculated special prices on the category page, but did not display them.

Indexers

• Magento now runs a selective partial re-indexing operation after import if you enabled Update on Schedule. Previously, Magento ran a full reindex no matter which index mode was set.

Import

• Magento now displays imported product images in this order: first, the base image, then the additional images in the order in which they were listed in the CSV file. Previously, Magento displayed images in this unexpected order: first, an additional image, then the base image, and finally, all remaining additional images.

Miscellaneous

• Magento now caches attribute options for the layered navigation feature. This reduces the number of queries to the database, and consequently improves performance.

• Magento no longer performs unnecessary file check operations (for example, file_exists, is_file), which improves the performance of the category and product pages.

• Magento now caches image metadata, which avoids the time-consuming need to read images for metadata loading.

• Magento now shows a significant decrease in Redis traffic after upgrading 2.1.2 to 2.1.4.

Swatches

• Magento no longer creates redundant objects when initializing a configurable product on the Category page.

• You can now disable swatches for both the Catalog page and search results (quick or advanced). To disable swatches from these requests, disable Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Storefront > Show Swatches in Product List.

• The logic that Magento uses to validate swatch attributes has been optimized.

• Magento now caches swatch data in the block cache, which improves the responsiveness of the configurable product pages.

System requirements

Our technology stack is built on PHP and MySQL. For more information, see System Requirements.

composer create-project --repository-url=https://repo.magento.com/ magento/project-community-edition=<version> <installation directory name>

composer create-project --repository-url=https://repo.magento.com/ magento/project-community-edition=2.1.1 magento2