White paper: Optimizing Drupal Performance – Benchmark Results

“Zend”:http://www.zend.com and “Acquia”:http://acquia.com have jointly released a new white paper entitled: Optimizing Drupal Performance – Benchmark Results.

This paper presents the results of performance benchmarks for comparing several common PHP runtime environments and configurations. The application used for benchmarking is Drupal, the open source social publishing platform.

Tested runtime environments included plain PHP, “Zend Server”:http://www.zend.com/products/server, and open-source optimizers, such as “APC”:http://ca.php.net/apc and “WinCache”:http://ca.php.net/manual/en/book.wincache.php.

For the purpose of this benchmark, a simple Drupal-based website was set up and tested in various commonly used Windows and Linux configurations.

Performance improvements for the Drupal setup were tested using the following technologies:

* Plain PHP 5.2.10
* APC bytecode caching
* APC bytecode caching + shared memory caching
* WinCache
* Zend Server bytecode caching (Optimizer+)
* Zend Server bytecode caching + shared memory/disk caching
* Zend Server full-page caching

The “full white paper”:http://www.zend.com/topics/Optimizing-Drupal-Performance-Zend-Acquia-Whitepaper-Feb2010.pdf is available online from Zend.