WP Benchmark: Setup

As I have announced already, I will going to benchmark various aspects of WordPress and plugins used. Before I proceed publishing benchmark results I am working on right now, I want to describe the benchmark setup I will use, WordPress versions and plugins that will be installed. So here is the test environment.

To begin all this, I will be using 3 WordPress version. With each version you can see the size of the installation without wp-content folder:

1. WordPress 2.6.5 (4.2MB)
2. WordPress 2.7.1 (5.3MB)
3. WordPress 2.8 (6.7MB)

All 3 versions will be set the same, all will use exact duplicate of this website, including Arthemia Premium theme, all plugins, posts, comments, settings, pages and everything else:

1. Posts: 34
2. Pages: 16
3. Comments: 215

After inserting all posts, with no plugins activated, I measured the size of databases for all 3 WP installations. WP 2.8 has significantly larger Options table mostly due to the new transient settings and new feeds format. I will post another similar chart after all the tests are done. And here is the list of installed plugin on all 3 test WordPress version.

1. Akismet 2.2.4
2. GD Press Tools 1.4.0
3. GD Simple Widgets 1.2.0
4. GD Star Rating 1.4.7
5. Google XML Sitemaps 3.1.4
6. HeadSpace2 3.2.28
7. MiniMeta Widget 4.2.0
8. SABRE 0.9.0
9. SEO Booster Lite 1.6.5
10. Sociable 3.1.3
11. SyntaxHighlighter Plus 1.0b2
12. TinyMCE Advanced 3.2.4
13. Twitter Tools 1.6
14. WordPress.com Stats 1.4
15. WordPress Download Monitor 3.1.4
16. WP-Slimbox2 0.9.7.1

GD Press Tools is always active an all test blogs and with this plugin, and benchmarking code added in it (only for these tests, it will not be added as a standard plugin feature) all measurements will be taken. All tests will be done on localhost setup on MS Windows Vista SP2 64bit with XAMPP 1.7.1.

1. Apache 2.2.11
2. PHP 5.2.9
3. MySQL 5.1.33

Test machine is very fast, AMD/nVidia based with strip mode RAID arrays and a lot of RAM:

1. CPU: AMD Phenom Black Edition 9850+ (QuadCore)
2. RAM: DDR2 8GB Kingston HyperX 800MHz
3. Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M750SLI-DS4 with nForce 750a SLI chipset
4. HDD: 2x500GB RAID1, 2x160GB RAID1

So, now you have all the basic facts, and expect first post with benchmark results in the next 3-4 days.