Zotonic's speed, A benchmark by Floris Benniks

Dutch web developer Floris Benniks tried Zotonic in a work session we had the other day. After this session he had rebuild his site in Zotonic. Both his old php site and the new Zotonic site where running next to each other on his machine. Benchmark time baby!

Zotonic's crew claims their framework is faster then the competition (Django, RoR, Wordpress, Drupal, Jooma!, etc). Any reasonably able developer does not just buy that. A simple benchmark could show a bit more of Zotonic's potential. As Floris had both his php site and his Zotonic site running on the same machine, it was the perfect environment for a comparison.

For the benchmark the "about" page of his site was used. The apache benchmark tool has been used for all testing.

ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://127.0.0.1:8000/about/

This command sends 1000 requests with 100 requests at the same time.

Specs

  • Zotonic uses postgreSQL 8.4 and Erlang R1304B.
  • The php site uses PHP 5.2.1 and MySQL 5.1.3.
  • The test computer is a Q6600 @3.1ghz (quadcode), 8gb ram, Vertex ssd

Requests per second

  • PHP: 167.62 [#/sec]
  • Zotonic: 1795.91 [#/sec]

Zotonic is 10.71x faster then the PHP site.

Transfer rate

  • PHP: 1023.23 [kb/sec]
  • Zotonic: 8130.70 [kb/sec]

Zotonic is 7.94x faster then the PHP site.

Conclusion

As It turns out, Zotonic is indeed faster then his PHP website. Of course there are many ways of testing and this is just one of them. Let's not see these numbers as final yet.

At least my mission has been accomplished. Floris is going to build all his websites in Zotonic from now on.

Check out the original Dutch article on florisbenniks.nl