Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform built on the Zend Framework. Zend Server is a PHP application stack that provides performance optimization for Magento through features like opcode caching, native caching support, and page caching. Using Zend Server along with enabling Magento's native caching and compilation modules can significantly improve performance by reducing page load times and the number of file system operations. Real-world examples show that these optimizations together can reduce average Magento response times from over 2 seconds to under 600 milliseconds.