Crisis Averted!

Update: (May 28, 2005) Since this article was written, a new benchmark has been completed. Poseidon was not included in the test, but Sencer raises some good points about web application benchmarking.

Lately I've been interested in the performance aspects of the most popular (to my knowledge) FREE blogging software packages available: Textpattern, WordPress, LightPress, a WordPress front-end replacement, and a lesser-known alternative, Poseidon. Though the latest version of Poseidon is still in development, the performance increases it lays claim to should be enough to make the other three development teams break into a cold sweat.

Does Speed Matter?

To the casual blogger, the performance of their chosen blogging software is of little concern. Especially if they are using a service like Blogger or TypePad. The casual blog reader doesn't care much either. They're familiar enough with the blogging process that they don't mind waiting a few seconds for the next page to load, or their comment to post. But faster is always better.

The hardcore blogger on the other hand is very aware of his or her surroundings, and the effects the performance their blogging software has on their visitors' overall experience. High traffic blogs can't be too slow, or they'll lose readership. And to a business blog where revenue is involved, performance holds even more significance. Granted many business blogs are run on commercial offerings such as Movable Type, but there's nothing stopping them from running a free offering just the same.

Finding Benchmark Data

I found very little official benchmark documentation from the development teams - or users. An extensive Googling resulting in a few leads though I stayed away from any discussion that felt too heated or religious as all I wanted were raw numbers. There seems to be one definitive source of comparison benchmarking of WordPress, LightPress and Textpattern: Sencer's WordPress vs. Textpattern - A Quick Performance Benchmark. Poseidon numbers are from a recent interview with Poseidon's lead developer Ryan Grove.

Enter: Poseidon

Compared to WordPress or Textpattern, Poseidon is young. Born in 2003, it went through several revisions that year. Development ceased and it lay dormant for about a year, until it was announced that development had resumed and the next version of Poseidon would not be based on existing code.

In the interview, Ryan spills the beans on some new Poseidon features including benchmark data.

Poseidon has some major advantages (and disadvantages) over WordPress, et al.: it is being built from the ground-up to take advantage of the capabilities of PHP5, most importantly PHP5's all-new object-oriented capabilities. That is, PHP4 will not work. Period. Additionally, Poseidon's theme engine is XSL-based, rather than based on proprietary template tags, and uses XSLT for manipulating XML data files. This is quite a change from what most bloggers are familiar with. But is indeed a more powerful approach to templating.

Because of these new features, Poseidon will face a major uphill battle for broad implementation. But it is setting a new standard in terms of blogging software performance.

The Numbers

Using Sencer's WordPress vanilla installation benchmark of 2.20 pages/second (454.834ms/page) as a baseline, here's the comparison:

Legend (plug-in name [data source]) ~: approximate

Sadly, I wasn't able to find numbers of Textpattern's static mode, which would likely improve its speed. But look at the improvements made to WordPress by using various caching plug-ins! Caching mechanisms have various overheads such as rebuilding and flushing processes that were not tested here, but according to the WP-Cache team (in Spanish, scroll down for the numbers), it vastly improves WordPress performance 40 times over. Though, according to Sencer's tests, WP-Cache improved performance by only 17 times, which is still nothing to scoff at.

LightPress is incompatible with WordPress output plug-ins and cannot benefit from Staticize or WP-Cache, though a similar plug-in may already exist.

Poseidon's numbers are truly beefy. A base installation is over 13 times faster than WordPress and only slightly slower than Sencer's test of WP-Cache. Poseidon really excels when its cache mechanism is put in to play. Poseidon employs a pluggable cache handler and was tested with two different cache handler plug-ins: one that uses the file system and another that uses memcached, the same caching mechanism used on Live Journal.

In any of these tests, the data is very non-scientific. There are many factors that can influence the outcome of a benchmark one way or the other. WordPress and Textpattern performance has been tested for a long time now, so I feel comfortable with the numbers Sencer arrived at.

Poseidon, on the other hand, is a different animal being built with brand new technologies, and is a long way from completion. It is possible its numbers could change drastically as development continues.

Conclusion

The comparisions drawn here are based strictly on performance, and in no way reflect a comparison of features (aside from the differences between object oriented programming in PHP4 and PHP5 and the effects those differences may or may not have).

With that said, Poseidon is fast. VERY fast. When compared to vanilla installations of Textpattern, WordPress and LightPress, Poseidon sets the standard for performance (unfair advantage, or not). And with its superior cache mechanism, Poseidon blows even WP-Cache out of the water.

However, Poseidon is nowhere near a release, and will face a massive uphill battle considering it is built with the latest and greatest tools available - many of which are difficult or impossible to find in a web hosting situation (PHP5) unless you are of a mind to maintain your own web server. This is not the case for the majority of bloggers and leaves a large window of opportunity for the other teams to gain ground before Poseidon is available, and before hosting providers upgrade their offerings.

Similarly, Poseidon's full feature set is yet unknown, so it is too early to make an apples to apples comparison. For now, Poseidon seems a likely candidate for the speed crown if all goes well. Until it is released, we won't know for sure if it will truly be the King. In the meantime, the performance bar has been raised, and the competition should take notice.