Recently a post of mine was linked on yCombinator and for some reason a lot of the comments talked about the efficiency of WordPress. While it’s technically not related to the subject of the linked post I just want to point out that the performance of WordPress is pretty horrible regardless of whether you use Apache or nginx.
My friend Karl Blessing and I recently talked about WordPress caching plugins. He uses WP SuperCache and I use W3 Total Cache and he subsequently decided to do some WordPress caching benchmarks on the different methods. He’s done an awesome job and generated some pretty graphs for you to look at.
What I took away from the whole thing is that W3 Total Cache and WP SuperCache can offer similar performance if you’re willing to do static file caching, however, W3 Total Cache can offer a cleaner solution with caching in Memcached if you’re willing to sacrifice a bit of performance. The benefit to this, and why I use this method, is that you don’t need complicated rules in your nginx (or Apache) configuration files.
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- Words by: Martin Fjordvald
- February 18, 2011
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Todd
Posted: August 6, 2011
Hi Martin,
Just managed 10,600 req/s with Nginx + WP Super Cache on a default WordPress install using a Linode 512 VPS.
Almost twice as fast as the W3 Total Cache plugin, no matter what combination of settings I used.
And much faster than Varnish too (with full caching on).
fjordvald
Posted: August 7, 2011
Yeah, but be honest with yourself, when are you ever going to need 10,600 requests per second for Wordpress? Or even half of that? Or even 1/10th of that? You won't, if you ever reach even 100 request per second then you will have one of the most popular blogs in the world and you will easily be able to afford another server.
Now have a look at your Super Cache configuration, yeah... good luck adding anything else to that without breaking stuff. I really do understand the need to have things faster and the "oh my gosh it's so fast!" feeling, but realistically I'd rather have ease of maintenance over performance any day of the week.