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Tech Notes -
General
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Written by Rick
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Sunday, 04 May 2008 00:00 |
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As part of a research project, I needed to determine which content management system (CMS) has the best performance. The contestants were narrowed to the 2 most popular CMS's, Drupal and Joomla!. Versions 5.7 and 6.2 from Drupal as well as Joomla!'s 1.0.15 and 1.5.3 were selected for comparison. Unfortunately, Drupal's 5.7 version could not complete the installation on my web host as it could not lock the tables for exclusive use. As my objective was to determine performance, not ease of installation, Drupal 5.7 was omitted. Testing out-of-the-box (stock) installations is problematic. Each version is configured differently and each project has it's own vision for what should be a basic stock installation. The purpose of this testing is to consider these factors to determine the speed/performance of the CMS basic installation. As such we'll consider not only raw delivery speed of the web index page but the size of the delivered page as well as the lines of code delivered.
About the Installation;
A shared web host was used for the purposes of testing. Each version was setup as a separate sub-domain. For detailed hosting information and configuration see ixwebhosting.com's Unlimited Pro package specifications. Each version was given it's own database setup on a MySQL 4.1.2 server. PHP version is 4.3.11. All installations were basic with stock templates and modules. No additional modules were added and no configuration changes were made. About the Tests;
A custom perl script was written to test the time required to download the index page for each site. Each HTTPResp test was run 3 consecutive times to provide an average. A copy of the perl script is posted here. The script is a CLI tool that does not cache pages. Additionally, http://www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php was used as another resource. Test Results | Test/Site | Drupal 6.2
| Joomla! 1.0.15
| Joomla! 1.5.3
| HTTPResp
Pass - 1(sec)
| 1.0295 | 0.6524 | 1.4046 | HTTPResp
Pass - 2(sec) | 0.6215 | 0.8137 | 1.0359 | HTTPResp
Pass - 3(sec) | 0.5412 | 0.5646 | 6.6839 | Code(Lines)
| 75
| 506
| 687 | | DnLoad Size(kb) | 5.23 | 20.52 | 30.91 |
| | Drupal 6.2
| Joomla! 1.0.15
| Joomla! 1.5.3
| HTTPResp
(average)
| 0.7307 | 0.6739 | 3.0415 | Per Line of Code
(average HTTPResp/Code Lines)
| .0097 | .0013 | 1.0138 | Per K-Byte Delivered
(average HTTPResp/DnLoad Size)
| 0.1397
| 0.0328 | 0.0983 |
Conclusion;
Joomla! 1.0.15 is the clear winner in all aspects.
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