

Ask: Is WordPress really as slow as simple benchmarking suggests? - henning

I've never run my own copy of WordPress. To experiment with it, I installed a simple LAMP bundle (XAMPP) with the default settings and then installed Wordpress (which is very easy if you've ever used databases).<p>Then I benchmarked it a little with the Apache benchmarking program ab.<p>I made a test post and then called ab on the page - the URL was http://localhost/wordpress/?p=3, i.e. I was running this locally on my machine. I called ab with various numbers of clients from 5 to 40 and basically WordPress topped out at 27 requests a second.<p>Retrieving a small static file, on the other hand, ran at about 3000 requests a second.<p>Now, the way to make WordPress, or just about any web application faster, is to use caching. In the case of Wordpress, there are app-specific caching plugins and you can also use bytecode caches like APC. These greatly increase the speed of WordPress, but probably 99% of all WordPress installations never use them.<p>I think, out of the box, WordPress should be able to produce many more requests than it does. I'm very much a fan of the "batteries included" philosophy, and I think you shouldn't need to install any plugins to get good performance.<p>The hardware I'm on is: Core 2 Quad, 2 GB RAM, Windows XP, 300 GB SATA2 hard drive.
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gnaritas
You can't compare a web server serving static content to a serving dynamically
generated content that comes from a database this way. All dynamically
generated database bound content no matter what language or framework you use
will be orders of magnitude slower than static content.

27 requests a second is just fine and _vastly_ more than 99% of blogs will
ever need. For those very few than need more, as you say, it only takes a few
plugins to install caching to get speeds that match static content serving.

27 requests a second for 24 hours is 2.3 million hits a day, very very few
websites out of the millions and millions in existence, get that much traffic.
Why exactly are you even worried about this? 27 requests a second is not bad
performance.

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henning
It will indeed work fine for most blogs. It's just that if anything any of
your users ever creates is submitted to a popular site like Digg, it won't
suffice.

The job of the developer is to solve problems for the user. I think not having
adequate scalability built in is slacking off on the job.

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gnaritas
Not true at all, fact is most submissions to Digg still don't generate enough
traffic to matter at all. Only if your post becomes popular will it get enough
traffic to matter and that is also pretty rare overall, and again easily
solved by the standard caching plugin.

