As boasted by Varien, Magento absolutely is a "platform for growth" however if like us you have been continually disappointed with the performance on a speed point of view from Magento 1.2 then there is good news. On March the 30th 2009 Magento announced the release of 1.3 and claimed that they have improved performance by 40% in both page loading time and memory usage. Keen to see this for our selfs, we loaded a fresh 1.3 installation with around 1,200 products yesterday and at first glance the catalog pages are much faster to load than in 1.2.

Additionally in 1.3 there is the option to use a 'flat' category type for databases of under 1,000 products which should improve performance again for smaller stores.

Magento 1.3 is still not lightening speed, though 1.3 is still quite a young release. Magento is certainly still a fantastic product and one to watch for the future.