[wp-hackers] Forum post: Huge server hits

[Robert Deaton]

I just finished up my first set of a few mini-benchmarks I'm going to
be working on, comparing WordPress out of the box with various caching
plugins. I'll post what I have so far.

I used my laptop for the benchmark. It has the following specs:
P4 2.8GHz Extreme Edition with Hyperthreading (its a desktop
processor, not a mobility piece of crap)
1GB DDR RAM

The laptop is running Gentoo Linux. A 2.6.10-cko4 kernel with vm
mapped set to 0 (server). It was running X at the time, as well as
xchat and a termnial so I could watch progress (doesn't truely have
much to do with it, since I forgot to watch RAM usage over tim).

The WordPress install was the latest 1.5 branch out of subversion,
fresh install, with 5 additional posts to the default, ranging from a
few characters to 75KB or so. Nothing else was changed.

Apache is 2.0.54-r11 (gentoo). The config file had nothing but the
document root changed.
mySQL is  4.0.24-r1 (gentoo). Absolutely nothing in the config was
changed, straight out of the box installation.

The test I did only covered loadaverage over the period of time. I
used ab2 for the test, and monitored load average over one hour,
taking a look at the load every 1 minute from /proc/loadavg. The ab
test didn't finish, since I put it at some insanely large number so
that it would keep going for at least an hour, not thinking about the
consequences. At any rate, here's the file that my scripts output.


(1 minute load average) (5 minute load average) (15 minute load
average) (irrelevant)
0.15 0.17 0.09 1/66 11489
12.54 3.63 1.27 24/123 11635
18.04 6.84 2.52 21/116 11721
19.48 9.30 3.64 21/116 11789
20.33 11.39 4.71 21/116 11846
20.80 13.14 5.73 23/116 11904
20.80 14.55 6.67 21/116 11963
21.11 15.76 7.58 22/116 12032
20.87 16.67 8.41 22/116 12085
21.24 17.56 9.23 24/116 12139
21.16 18.21 9.97 21/116 12193
19.98 18.37 10.54 22/114 12244
20.96 18.94 11.22 22/114 12297
21.04 19.33 11.84 24/114 12348
21.39 19.74 12.44 25/114 12403
21.71 20.12 13.03 22/114 12453
21.14 20.27 13.52 24/114 12502
21.31 20.47 14.02 22/114 12564
21.43 20.67 14.52 23/114 12615
21.47 20.83 14.95 23/114 12661
22.02 21.09 15.41 23/114 12710
20.27 20.86 15.69 13/110 12757
21.51 21.11 16.10 22/114 12811
21.48 21.17 16.43 23/114 12857
21.83 21.33 16.78 23/114 12905
21.88 21.43 17.10 24/114 12956
21.15 21.33 17.33 21/114 13004
21.32 21.34 17.58 24/114 13063
21.73 21.47 17.86 22/114 13116
21.64 21.50 18.10 21/114 13162
22.12 21.65 18.36 24/114 13208
22.22 21.77 18.61 23/114 13267
21.53 21.66 18.76 16/115 13316
20.88 21.44 18.87 22/114 13367
20.42 21.16 18.93 22/114 13412
19.47 20.83 18.96 19/114 13463
18.30 20.25 18.87 18/114 13508
16.50 19.43 18.68 13/114 13573
15.83 18.76 18.50 8/114 13621
17.52 18.70 18.49 22/114 13662
19.22 18.98 18.60 21/114 13719
19.86 19.19 18.69 21/114 13766
20.23 19.41 18.80 21/114 13813
20.31 19.59 18.89 21/114 13866
20.23 19.70 18.97 22/114 13914
20.48 19.87 19.07 21/114 13967
20.42 19.96 19.16 22/114 14016
20.32 20.03 19.23 21/114 14079
20.15 20.03 19.28 21/114 14128
20.25 20.08 19.34 23/114 14178
20.30 20.15 19.41 21/114 14229
20.17 20.15 19.45 21/114 14276
20.47 20.23 19.52 23/114 14325
20.52 20.29 19.58 22/114 14378
20.33 20.28 19.62 22/114 14427
20.49 20.33 19.68 22/114 14474
20.36 20.33 19.72 23/114 14525
20.42 20.35 19.76 22/114 14586
20.35 20.35 19.80 22/114 14638
20.76 20.45 19.87 21/114 14689


I'm currently in the process of refining how I take these benchmarks
to gather the most information possible. If anybody has some ideas for
apache bench or any other tool to do some benchmarking, please pass it
my way, and I will preform more benchmarks (I plan to duplicate the
benchmarks on my desktop also.


-- 
--Robert Deaton
http://somethingunpredictable.com