Drupal vs Wordpress performance comparassion

Question

Hi, in the beggining i build my site - bemcapaz.net - on Wordpress. But after having to hack the core and build lots of stuff trought direct programming I decided to move on to Drupal.

Drupal besides being a CMS focused more on community websites is great for doing anything you can imagine in a really simple way, even a Blog wich was what I created.

My question now is, wich one offers the best performance? I think drupal looks like to be really heavier than Wordpress but since im not a advanced programmer I have no idea how to evaluate wich one offers the fastest mysql requests and loading times of the web pages.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I've heard Drupal's caching mechanisms are super aggressive compared to other CMS systems, but I don't know anything concrete. Your best bet would be to do a quick benchmark of both. For the most part, whichever one makes fewer SQL queries is faster,. Drupal should make fewer queries because of its use of caching, so my guess is that Drupal is faster, if only by a bit.

But honestly, I don't think it matters too much, unless you're getting millions of unique hits a day.

Answer 2

I'm guessing a lot of this depends on the plugins/modules you'll be using.

Answer 3

Don't know about Drupal, but in WP you can estimate query time with following code: Just add it to your footer, after any queries.

<?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds.

I suppose, performance for both CMS depends on numbers and complexity of queries and caching mechanism. If you are using them both wisely, your performance gonna be OK. I mean - ask your database only for info you really need ;)

Answer 4

Drupal is definitely heavier in the sense that it runs more queries per page once you've customized it. Using modules like Views, you can also build your own dynamic queries to drive widgets and pages. Those can be as speedy or as slow as the underlying combination of joins allows.

On the other hand, Drupal does have much more robust caching controls. Full-page output caching for anon users, granular caching of widget output, and granular caching of any data retrieved by a Views query can all combine to help quite a bit. There are also plugin modules like "Boost" or "Memcached" that let you augment that underlying cache system with materialized HTML files in the filesystem (bypassing Drupal directly in favor of apache), or a memcached server that stores all the cached information in memory rather than the database.

If you're looking to discover hot spots in a Drupal site you should also install the Devel module; it allows you to get query counts and detailed query times for each page on the site, and track them down to the module that's running them.