Drupal vs WordPress performance comparison

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In the beginning i built my site – bemcapaz.net – on WordPress. But after having to hack the core and build lots of stuff through 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 which was what I created.

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My question now is, which one offers the best performance? I think Drupal looks to be really heavier than WordPress but since I’m not an advanced programmer I have no idea how to evaluate which one offers the fastest MySQL requests and loading times of the web pages.

Thanks.

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3 comments

  1. 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.

  2. 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 😉

  3. If someone (like me) wants a raw and simple time-comparasion, I wrote the exact same App 3 times (with 3 frameworks), which’s result will share below.

    Note that I didn’t do any heavy queries.
    Or anything which would affect the results
    (in favor of one framework over the other).

    In my local with Core-i7 CPU, and SSD storage:

    • Drupal toke 5 seconds to show a simple page:

      • And that because of caching,
      • If I clear cache manually, takes 25 seconds (and recreates cache, so the next run takes 5 seconds again),
      • But don’t worry a server’s hosting-machine is far stronger than my local-host (>ლ)

    • While WordPress toke 17 seconds for same page (and that always).

      • Again, don’t worry a server’s host is far stronger than my local.

    • Rewriting with Laravel, same App takes 850 mili-seconds 😉

    So, if you don’t have the time, money or knowledge to create a basic CMS with Laravel, then Drupal is the obvious winner (but harder to learn compared to WordPress).