Fast made faster

I’ve been really happy with the speed at which my self-hosted WordPress site runs on Digital Ocean. But when I saw the announcement on WP Tavern of a new one-click Simple Cache plug-in, I had to give it a try (“A New One-Click Install Caching Plugin for WordPress,” April 14, 2016). I guess it’s a sickness.
First, though, I fired up ApacheBenchX to get an idea how fast this site responded without Simple Cache. This is what I got:

Benchmarking website (be patient).....without caching
Server Software:        cloudflare-nginx
Document Path:          /
Document Length:        42237 bytes
Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   0.170 seconds
Complete requests:      1
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      42773 bytes
HTML transferred:       42237 bytes
Requests per second:    5.89 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       169.659 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       169.659 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          246.20 [Kbytes/sec] received

Then, I installed Simple Cache, enabled it, and ran it twice (to ensure that there was actually something in the cache). That’s when the wow hit me:

Benchmarking website (be patient).....with Simple Cache
Server Software:        cloudflare-nginx
Document Path:          /
Document Length:        42239 bytes
Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   0.060 seconds
Complete requests:      1
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      42567 bytes
HTML transferred:       42239 bytes
Requests per second:    16.55 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       60.419 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       60.419 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          688.02 [Kbytes/sec] received

Not only was this the easiest set-up for any caching plug-in ever, the load times seem to be dramatically faster.

Thumbs-up on Simple Cache.