Magento 2.1.6 Update

Magento 2.1.6 was released on April 9. It’s an important update with many performance improvements and without any security related fixes.

The main performance enhancements are:

• Improved performance of the Category page
• Optimized image resizing and the caching of image metadata is also up to 50% faster
• Improved performance of layered navigation
• Minimized indexing operations after product import
• The check that Magento runs to confirm a configurable product’s readiness for sale is now faster
• 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

It contains also following fixes:

• 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
• The storefront now displays images that Magento resizes during product save operations, rather than resizing the product on the storefront
• Magento no longer calculates configurable product special prices on the category page
• Magento now runs a selective partial re-indexing operation after import if you enabled «Update on Schedule»
• 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
• Magento no longer creates redundant objects when initializing a configurable product on the Category page
• 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

A more detailed list can be found at devdocs.magento.com.

And don’t forget to backup before updating.