{"id":542,"date":"2014-05-24T20:31:15","date_gmt":"2014-05-24T16:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hakbox.com\/?p=542"},"modified":"2014-05-26T04:35:56","modified_gmt":"2014-05-26T00:35:56","slug":"wordpress-caching-plugins-worth-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hakbox.com\/?p=542","title":{"rendered":"WordPress Caching Plugins – Are They Worth It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I figured I’d look into some WordPress caching options. \u00a0Rather than setting up my own caching service, I figured I would try out some of the available caching plugins. \u00a0Note: I only looked at the free versions of each plugin.<\/em><\/p>\n

So, after a quick download of jmeter, and jmeter plugins, I created a basic test plan to load the home page, several articles, and all articles by a single tag (hawaii).<\/p>\n

Keep in mind this was an extremely basic benchmark. No resource utilization was captured from the host servers (Apache or MySQL). <\/p>\n

The initial results were interesting. \u00a0Most seem to make no difference, under moderate load, what-so-ever, in terms of the site’s performance. \u00a0Some made the load times even slower. \u00a0The following graphs show the results for the same tests, at increasing load over time (threads).<\/p>\n

Initial Findings
\n<\/strong>Looking at 5 concurrent threads loading the Home page as the comparison for each test, there is a slight improvement of about 100 to 300 milliseconds for all the Caching plugins, except W3 Total Cache (Edge Enabled),\u00a0which is about 200 milliseconds slower than no caching at all<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Looking at the Home Page specifically:
\n<\/strong>At 5 concurrent threads, here are the average load times:<\/p>\n