If you’ve thought about whether upgrading from WP Cache 2.0 to WP Super Cache is a good idea, hopefully this benchmark will convince you. I followed my instructions on benchmarking Wordpress with Apache Bench on four configurations of this blog’s main page to measure performance:

1. Without any caching plugins
2. With WP Cache 2.0
3. With WP Super Cache (no compression)
4. With WP Super Cache (compression enabled)

The results show that WP Super Cache is a clear winner, performing 225% better than the older WP Cache. Here is the raw data I gathered during the test:

No caching:
Requests per second: 22.81 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4383.559 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 43.836 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 613.75 [Kbytes/sec] received

WP cache:
Requests per second: 872.30 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 114.640 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.146 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 23549.46 [Kbytes/sec] received

Super cache (no compression):
Requests per second: 1518.90 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 65.837 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.658 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 41150.81 [Kbytes/sec] received

Super cache (compression):
Requests per second: 1960.39 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 51.010 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.510 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 53108.70 [Kbytes/sec] received

For more tips on how to improve your Wordpress performance, check out Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours. Another interesting WP caching plugin is Batcache, which uses the memcached backend to serve requests out of a cluster of machines’ RAM memory.

8 Responses to “WP Super Cache Benchmark”

1. Willem Kossen says:

   9/29/2008 at 3:48 am

   hi,

   How about the http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-widget-cache/ wp-widget-cache? It seems to help me, but I would like to see the ‘hard data’ on that one.

   Thanks!

   Willem Kossen

   Reply
2. Donncha O Caoimh says:

   9/29/2008 at 4:43 am

   You should check out the development version too. It fixes a long standing bug where the page was compressed twice, once for the current visitor, and again for the archived supercache page!

   ‘Course, requesting the same file over and over won’t show any benefit, but in real world visits it should help a lot!

   Reply
3. Elliott Back says:

   9/29/2008 at 8:27 pm

   Thanks for the suggestion, I tried the development version but I didn’t see a significant performance improvement for this kind of test. The bug sounds like it would be amortized over the cache writes, anyway, so it’s not a huge deal right?

   Reply
4. Brad Hart @ A DoFollow Blog says:

   9/30/2008 at 3:19 pm

   I love super cache for my high traffic sites

   Reply
5. 10 step guide for improving a vanilla WordPress install - ZachBrowne.com says:

   11/16/2008 at 5:55 am

   [...] Super Cache (plugin) & WP Cache (plugin) - WordPress caching benchmark results for both vs. a vanilla WordPress [...]

   Reply
6. Nakia J Bryden says:

   2/10/2009 at 2:11 am

   great article!, grats for u site

   Reply
7. Ralph P Dickerson says:

   2/11/2009 at 2:13 am

   your blog is great!

   Reply
8. 10 step guide for improving a vanilla WordPress install - Derek Punsalan - 5ThirtyOne says:

   3/10/2009 at 11:25 am

   [...] Super Cache (plugin) & WP Cache (plugin) - WordPress caching benchmark results for both vs. a vanilla WordPress [...]

   Reply