WordPress Hosting : Best webserver for high performance on high traffic in 2017

Performance of the website is one of the key to success of the website and specially with growing users traffic on the website make it vital part. In recent years, demand for wordpress platform grows rapidly but there are hardly  optimized servers for the best performance and security possible when you expect thousands of users on your website. One of our client(news corp) was looking for performance improvements for their kidspot.com.auand consulted us for the best possible solution.

There is a huge number of open source and commercials web servers out there. Apache is the most common web servers in use today but performance of the server on high load is pathetic with default php module. We investigated lots of web servers and finalize some of them for our final decision. We picked up open litespeed, nginx and apache+nginx(Combo) for the performance load testing and sharing the results in this blog.

Testing Environment:

Inspite of testing hello word or some static files, we have used the the latest wordpress and imported test data have real-time experience. We have used the VPS serverswith following configurations:

Performance Optimization:

We have optimized each of the server using our in-house high performance tweaks .On all servers, php platform (php-fpm), caching(APC) and database were fine tuned for high performance and availability. We have installed nginx on http://nginx.pragmaapps.com, open litespeed on http://litespeed.pragmaapps.com and nginx+apache(combo) on http://acehost.pragmaapps.com (We used nginx as reverse proxy and used apache+php-fpm+fastcgi to process php file).

Conclusion:

As per our benchmark nginx+apache performs nearly 15% better than the open litespeed and nearly 10% better than nginx. We think with the optimization on php platform and fine tuning apache resulted in better performance. Performance of the open litespeed seems better when there is less load on the site but once the load increases the performance degraded. The nginx+apache(combo) wins the race on higher user load and hence we have chosen it to provide our optimized wordpress hosting in collaboration with Acehost. These results may vary based on hardware configurations on dedicated or vps plans.

Apache Benchmark Testing DataServer Software: apache–nginx
Server Hostname: acehost.pragmaapps.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /
Document Length: 56833 bytes

Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 48.881 seconds
Complete requests : 1000
Failed requests: 8
(Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 8, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors: 0
Non-2xx responses: 1
Total transferred: 57126998 bytes
HTML transferred: 56550211 bytes
Requests per second: 20.46 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4888.051 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 48.881 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1141.32 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 8 9 2.2 8 35
Processing: 2233 4820 451.5 4862 8046
Waiting: 2216 4803 451.0 4845 8029
Total: 2242 4829 451.6 4871 8057

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 4871
66% 4920
75% 4951
80% 4973
90% 5033
95% 5128
98% 6309
99% 6455
100% 8057 (longest request)
Server Software: nginx/1.4.3
Server Hostname: nginx.pragmaapps.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /
Document Length: 59881 bytes

Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 49.159 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 60301000 bytes
HTML transferred: 59881000 bytes
Requests per second: 20.34 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4915.853 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 49.159 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1197.91 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.8 0 4
Processing: 1481 4833 764.6 4884 8839
Waiting: 1061 2645 590.8 2609 6523
Total: 1481 4834 764.7 4884 8843

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 4884
66% 4947
75% 4979
80% 4999
90% 5072
95% 5181
98% 7335
99% 8624
100% 8843 (longest request)

Server Software: LiteSpeed
Server Hostname: litespeed.pragmaapps.com
Server Port: 8088

Document Path: /wordpress/
Document Length: 59604 bytes

Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 48.549 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 60003000 bytes
HTML transferred: 59604000 bytes
Requests per second: 20.60 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4854.911 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 48.549 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1206.96 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 1 2.2 0 9
Processing: 3604 4823 1388.4 4414 9243
Waiting: 2212 3014 1382.2 2590 7330
Total: 3604 4824 1390.5 4414 9252

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 4414
66% 4488
75% 4543
80% 4578
90% 8705
95% 8948
98% 9054
99% 9118
100% 9252 (longest request)