WordPress 2.7 tiny benchmark

Hey,

After yesterday when i installed WordPress 2.7 i was interested by how the performance was going to be. So i ran a small benchmark tool called: AB (Apache Benchmark) and tested it locally.

I tested it on my notebook (Acer Aspire 5630, Core 2 duo T5200 1.6 Ghz and 1 gig memory.
The OS i tested it on was Fedora 10.

Changes i made:

• Enabled url rewriting in apache
• Turned on permalinks in WordPress

I did not install any other modules in WordPress. All just the default stuff.
Everything else is just the default fedora install for:

• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP

with no settings changed.

Now for the results:

Server Software:        Apache/2.2.10
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        5081 bytes

Concurrency Level:      5
Time taken for tests:   86.132 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      5319000 bytes
HTML transferred:       5081000 bytes
Requests per second:    11.61 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       430.658 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       86.132 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          60.31 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   3.5      0      67
Processing:   194  430  69.2    432     688
Waiting:      181  418  69.3    419     688
Total:        194  430  69.5    432     689

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50%    432
66%    459
75%    477
80%    490
90%    517
95%    543
98%    569
99%    586
100%    689 (longest request)

Those results are.. kinda slow! With this new WordPress you can have (on my notebook hardware) just 11 requests per second. If you have a site that has 11 requests per second you have a populair site and your probably on your own dedi/colo server but if you are on a shared host this can be to heavy to run! In the old days when i had lame shared hosting a simple topsite script an a forum (Invision Power board) where banned to use because it took to much resources… this wordpress is surely heavier then those 2 scripts about 6 or 7 years ago!

I also looked at the CPU usage when running the benchmark. it was at 100% !!

WordPress is a nice user friendly script but they need to do something about there resource usage and for the next version get rid of the php 4 support.

I might run some more benchmarks later this month along with some profiling and how the WP-Super-Cache module can change things.

For now the conclusion is that WordPress 2.7 is resource hungry and probably not a good idea to run on a shared host I must admit that i’m running it on a shared host on mageprojects (where you read this now) and i haven’t got an angry mail yet from my host.. but then again.. i get just a few visits in here.

That’s it for now,
Mark