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Quick and dirty WordPress speed comparison

July 6, 2011 in Benchmarks, Web hosting with 0 Comments

This is just a quick benchmark of WordPress release 2.8.6, 2.9.2, 3.0.6, 3.1.4 and 3.2.

The test was done on a 512MB rackspace instance, running Ubuntu 10.10. With the following packages installed with default configuration: libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server php5-mysql. Benchmark was done with ab, doing 10 000 requests to the front page, over 10 concurrent connections.

This is the result, in requests delivered per second:

Clearly, speed isn’t that much improved with the release of 3.2. However, this benchmark only tested the front page with the sample post.

WordPress 3.2 beta 1 speedtest

May 14, 2011 in Benchmarks, Web hosting with 1 Comment

With every new WordPress release, things seems to be getting slower. But not anymore? With the release of WordPress 3.2 developers state that performance is getting better.

The test was done on a 512MB rackspace instance, running Ubuntu 10.10. With the following packages installed with default configuration: libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server php5-mysql. Benchmark was done with ab, doing 10 000 requests to the front page, over 10 concurrent connections. Both blogs used the Twenty Ten 1.2 theme, and the supplied sample post.

This is the result, in requests delivered per second:

As you can see, things aren’t any faster, yet. But this is still a beta, and i only tested the performance of the front page, nothing else. I also tried the Twenty Eleven theme, but that wasn’t any faster.

Rackspace Cloud Servers, US vs UK

January 4, 2011 in Benchmarks, Cloud computing with 0 Comments

Today, Rackspace opened up the beta for Cloud Servers in the UK. This is a quick performance comparison with the US cloud, using SysBench.

The test was done using four servers (two on each site, one 256MB instance and one 512MB). All servers ran Ubuntu 10.10.

Without further ado, here’s the results (less is better).

Product SysBench CPU Sysbench Memory Sysbench File I/O
US 256 4.0s 184.5s 22.6s
US 512 4.0s 185.7s 20.3s
UK 256 4.0s 190.2s 21.4s
UK 512 4.0s 191.1s 18.5s

There seems to be good capacity at both sites, performance was almost identical.

The following commands where used to do the benching, interesting values was the total time to run the test.

sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=cpu run
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=memory run
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=fileio --file-test-mode=rndrw prepare
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=fileio --file-test-mode=rndrw run

Amazon EC2 Micro instance, how fast is it?

September 9, 2010 in Benchmarks, Cloud computing with 11 Comments

Today, Amazon announced a new instance type for EC2. I micro instance with 613MB memory and a starting price of $0.02 per hour. But how fast is it?

I’ve previously benchmarked Amazon EC2 and Rackspace, and here comes a new quick-and-dirty performance test using SysBench. The following products where tested.

Product CPU Memory Disk Price
Amazon EC2 Micro 1-2 virtual core 613MB N/A (uses EBS) $0.02 per hour
Rackspace Small 4 virtual cores 256MB 10GB $0.015 per hour

Servers where running Ubuntu 10.04 64bits, tests where performed on two different servers, average scores where used. Here’s the results, less is good.

Product SysBench CPU Sysbench Memory Sysbench File I/O
Amazon EC2 Micro 197.6s * 2635.1s 6.7s
Rackspace Small 7.9s 336.8s 57.3s

* I did manage do boost this down to 35s one run, since bursting is allowed for shorter periods. The following two runs took around 200s.

The following commands where used to do the benching, interesting values was the total time to run the test.

sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=cpu run
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=memory run
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=fileio --file-test-mode=rndrw prepare
sysbench --num-threads=4 --test=fileio --file-test-mode=rndrw run

Conclusion

According to SysBench, Rackspace is much faster then Amazon EC2 when it comes to CPU and Memory tests. Amazon EBS is however much faster then the Rackspace storage.

Precaching with WP Super Cache

August 26, 2010 in Benchmarks, Web hosting with 1 Comment

Since earlier this year, the WordPress cache plugin WP Super Cache supports precaching. This enables the ability to create static content of your entire site.

For a busy site this is probably not needed, since user activity triggers generation of static files. But for a smaller sites (like this one) it could help speed things up for both visitors and search engines, which in turn could improve your page rank.

I activated precache around midnight yesterday, this performance graph shows quite well the difference in loading times.

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