Drupal Performance Benchmarks 5.8 vs 6.3

We benchmark the two supported releases of Drupal currently available, 5.8 and 6.3, in order to determine the winner in regards to core performance. Both of these fresh installs are running in the following limited VPS environment:

• VDS ( Virtual Dedicated Server )
• Intel Xeon 2.00GHz
• 512 MB RAM
• Fedora Core OS
• Apache 2.2.3
• PHP 5.0.4
• MySQL 5.0.51

Benchmarking

As mentioned both of these installs contain nothing but core modules which are enabled by default, displaying 5 nodes on the front page, with page cache disabled. Both of these installs were benchmarked using the Apache Benchmarking Tool with the following command (100 requests, concurrency of 10):

Drupal 5 vs 6 - Page Cache Disabled

The following results derived from benchmarking both installs without page cache enabled.

Drupal 5 vs 6 - Normal Page Cache Mode

Below are the results of enabling the "Normal" page cache mode via admin/settings/performance.

Drupal 5 vs 6 - Aggressive Page Cache Mode

Although Aggressive mode is often not an option due some modules requiring to supply functionality for each page request, however it does supply a fairly large boost in performance, completely bypassing loading of modules.

The performance increase in regards to Aggressive cache mode certainly will vary depending on the modules you have enabled, in the core results below you can see there is not much difference, however this would certainly be a much different result once additional modules are enabled such as views, panels,

The Winner

The clear winner of this test has been Drupal 5. Maxing out around 220 requests per second serving from this environment. We will later be benchmarking popular contrib modules for both Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 such as views and CCK to see how well they perform for our next generation of Drupal sites.