Not a question, just an observation. We will be rebuilding our store for M2, but as it’s a large store with lots of products and customers, we’re currently still running on Magento 1.9. I aim to make the switch over the Easter break when we’re always quiet. Soooo, this weekend just gone I decided as an interim measure I would upgrade our M1 store to 1.9.4.0 to enable us to run PHP7.2. It initially broke our onepage checkout, but that only took 40 minutes or so to work out what was wrong and fix it (a rougue file left behind during upgrade). My initial thoughts are that this is very much worth doing, the speed increase is amazing, both in the front end and especially in the back end, it absolutely flies along. We were already running PHP 7.0 using the Inchoo patch that was published by them, but now that M1 officially supports PHP 7.2 it seemed worth the effort to upgrade. Fortunately all of our extensions work just fine with PHP7.2, but that is the only consideration to take into account really. Well worth the effort on a Saturday morning!
The solution for our broken onepage checkout can be found here. It might help somebody else: https://community.magento.com/t5/Magento-1-x-Security-Patches/Re-SUPEE-9767-v2-causes-saveBilling-500-server-error/td-p/71939
So, my experiences so far with Magento 1 sites are that they were typically run down to a state where any SUPEE patches would fail to install - and the extensions were either no longer supported. Therefore, they never managed to get away from PHP 5.6. I’m so thankful I don’t work on Magento 1 sites anymore.
It sounds like you keep your setup in great working order, to be able to both keep up-to-date with the patches and be able to run PHP7.2 with minimal fuss. Hats of to you.
My experience with Magento 2.2.7 running on PHP7.1 has been exceptional - Even in Developer Mode. I think you’ll be happy with your results running Magento 2.3.x on PHP7.2. I won’t be upgrading to 2.3 until it gets to about 7.3.2. I like to allow time for any bugs to get patched from major updates before adopting it.
Looking forward to hearing how you get on with your migration further down the line.
In all honesty I was behind with patches, mainly because I tried to update to 1.9.3 a while back, and it broke the onepage checkout. It was the same issue as I had this weekend, only this time I found out what the issue was. Previously I just rolled back from my back up files and DB, with the intention of having another crack further down the line. I do use a staging area, but didn’t notice the onepage checkout issue, I thought all was well so rolled it out as the production site! Doh!
My logic in upgrading straight to 1.9.4 is it obviously includes all the missed patches and added PHP7.2 compatibility. Seemed to kill a number of birds with one stone!