Benchmarking Wordpress and Django

Regular readers will know that I recently migrated to lighttpd from Apache 2, to try and enable my blog to handle traffic spikes better. Out of curiosity, I decided to benchmark the new setup.

I used a dedicated server on a 100Mbit line at ovh, France to perform the tests on my 256mb Xen VPS in London.

First I installed ApacheBench, which is in the Debian package apache2-utils. Then I made it send 1000 requests, 10 concurrently, (figures I chose off the top of my head) to each of the following sites I host:


  • A static file

  • Wordpress with wp-cache plugin on php5-cgi with 4 processes under fastcgi

  • Django eshop running in threaded mode under fastcgi

  • CherryPy webpwman running under fastcgi

Now I don't claim it was a fair test, but the results are pretty shocking.:

Average time per request on ion.maniacmartin.com:







Ping time12ms
Static53ms
Django113ms
CherryPy238ms
Wordpress1700ms (+539 failed requests)

When my blog was reddited, it was Wordpress without wp-cache on Apache workers, all of which contained unncessesary mod_python Django instances. It stood no chance. Even after the optimisations I have done, Wordpress still performs shockingly bad compared to the alternatives.

I will probably be switching my blog to a Django-powered backend, such as the soon-to-be-released aeblog, that powers Aeracode.

Update: You can get a second opinion, which also shows that Django is faster, but by a much smaller margin.

Posted 9th August 2008 in Computer, with 6 comments

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