WordPress Benchmarks

We compared the speed at which different web servers and caching platforms respond to requests for WordPress pages on a cPanel setup, using both non-keep-alive and keep-alive connections.

Our test platforms included

  • LiteSpeed Enterprise (LSWS) using the popular W3 Total Cache and WPRocket WordPress cache plugins, as well as with our LiteSpeed Cache Plugin for WordPress.
  • Apache using the W3 Total Cache and WPRocket WordPress cache plugins.

Our results showed Apache (with keep-alive enabled) peaking around 1,300 and 700 requests per second with W3TC and WPRocket, respectively.

With the exact same setup, LSWS with W3TC and WPRocket delivered around 4,800 requests per second, an improvement factor of over 2.6x or 6x respectively.

Using the LiteSpeed Cache Plugin for WordPress with LSWS easily handled close to 5,200 requests per second.

Summary

LSWS with LSCache Performance Gain
Concurrent Users Keep-Alive Apache / WPRocket Apache / W3TC Nginx / FCGI LSWS / W3TC LSWS / WPRocket
10 No 5.6x 3.2x 4.9x 1.2x 1.2x
Yes 7.4x 4.0x 6.4x 1.1x 1.1x
100 No 5.7x 3.2x 5.0x 1.2x 1.2x
Yes 6.3x 3.5x 5.0x 1.1x 1.1x
Notes:
  • Default configurations were used when possible.
  • Rewrite rule caching was used for W3TC and WPRocket to ensure maximum peformance.
  • The test was performed over a 10GBps network connection to make sure network bandwidth did not become a bottleneck.
  • The benchmark simulated serving 10,000 requests to 10 and 100 users.

Test Environment

Software:

LiteSpeed Enterprise 5.1.13
Nginx 1.10.3
Apache 2.4.25
PHP 7.1.2
cPanel 62
FastCGI Cache
WPRocket 2.9.8.1
W3TC 0.9.5.2
LSCache WordPress 1.0.14.1

Server hardware specs:

Intel Xeon X5660 Single Core @ 2.80GHz
2GB RAM
50GB HDD
CloudLinux 7.3

Client hardware specs:

Intel Xeon E5-1620 Dual Core @ 3.60GHz
2GB RAM CentOS 6.8 with OpenVZ kernel 2.6.32-042stab116.1
Intel X540 10GBASE-T on board NIC

Network Switch:

Netgear XS708E-100NES 8-ports 10G switch

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