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.
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