Ask: Is WordPress really as slow as simple benchmarking suggests?

I've never run my own copy of WordPress. To experiment with it, I installed a simple LAMP bundle (XAMPP) with the default settings and then installed Wordpress (which is very easy if you've ever used databases).

Then I benchmarked it a little with the Apache benchmarking program ab.

I made a test post and then called ab on the page - the URL was http://localhost/wordpress/?p=3, i.e. I was running this locally on my machine. I called ab with various numbers of clients from 5 to 40 and basically WordPress topped out at 27 requests a second.

Retrieving a small static file, on the other hand, ran at about 3000 requests a second.

Now, the way to make WordPress, or just about any web application faster, is to use caching. In the case of Wordpress, there are app-specific caching plugins and you can also use bytecode caches like APC. These greatly increase the speed of WordPress, but probably 99% of all WordPress installations never use them.

I think, out of the box, WordPress should be able to produce many more requests than it does. I'm very much a fan of the "batteries included" philosophy, and I think you shouldn't need to install any plugins to get good performance.

The hardware I'm on is: Core 2 Quad, 2 GB RAM, Windows XP, 300 GB SATA2 hard drive.