So there is this benchmark at http://sven.webiny.com/benchmark-webiny-vs-wordpress-vs-drupal-vs-joomla-vs-tomatocms/
Can I really trust it? I mean it came as a surprise to me that Drupal is so much faster than WordPress and Joomla. I always thought of it as a super heavy CPU devouring monster compared to the aforementioned.
Drupal, Joomla and WordPress benchmark results
That benchmark is like comparing a train with a plane. Yes, a plane is faster, but that doesn’t mean that you should take a plane to commute to work.
A CMS is just a tool, and you need the tool that is most suitable for your project. There is a huge difference between a corporate brochure (5 pages, little interaction, no logged in users), a blog (100 pages, some interaction, some logged in users) and a community platform (10000 pages, lots of interaction, most users logged in). I think every CMS in that benchmark can be the top performer for a specific type of site.
Benchmarking stock installs of these three CMSes is useless. No one uses them without additional modules (which often have major performance implications), and anyone competent is going to set up performance enhancers like caching.
Do note, also, that the CMS that comes out on-top for every benchmark category is the blog author’s own project.
WordPress with a caching plugin would be just as fast.
Put NGINX in front of the webserver, and what CMS you use is immaterial. The site will be much faster.
Put your site’s static assets on a CDN, and even better.
WP is easy to work with and expand. Drupal takes a gazillion modules and many queries per page. Both have excellent caching modules.
This is 2011. Not 1999. Frontend “performance” of a website to a visitor has very little to do with the backend. Movable Type would be the fastest of all of these because it writes out plain HTML files, but who wants to use the archaic CGI technology with limited plugins.
I have to say I’m a big fan of Joomla. If you’re new to CMS, Joomla has much
less of a learning curve – and despite statements to the contrary – is just as
capable as Drupal for running large/popular sites. But choosing a proper CMS
depends on your experience level and the time you have to spend on the project.
To know more about the differences among your mentioned CMSs refer to
Comparison of Top 3 CMSs: WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla. There you can get
the detailed info in a simple format.