Drupal 7 vs Drupal 8 Performance Comparison

Development of Drupal 8 has reached a maturity level whereby alpha versions have been released. Naturally, I was curious to know how Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 compare performance wise

Since the number of modules enabled by default on both systems are different, I also did a test with particular modules enabled on Drupal 7 (more details below).

The performance comparison tests were run on:

• MacBook Pro 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 (Quad Core)
• 16 GB of RAM
• OSX 10.9.2 (Mavericks)
• PHP 5.4.26
• MySQL 5.1.68
• Drupal 7.26 (January 15th, 2014)
• Drupal 8 alpha10 (March 19th, 2014)

I used Apache Benchmark to run the performance test. I made 1000 requests with a concurrency level of 20 for each case (-n 1000 -c 20). Two types of tests were run, they were:

• Requesting the front page for an anonymous user.
• Login with administrator credentials.

For each case the ab test was run 5 times; I then took the highest number from the results.

The above two types of tests were run on 3 different environments, they were:

• Drupal 8 (Standard out of the box)
• Drupal 7 (Standard out of the box)
• Drupal 7 with the following modules installed and enabled (these are standard in Drupal 8). I only added a selected few modules instead of trying to match each and every module between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.
• breakpoints, ctools, ckeditor, contact, edit, libraries, entity, views, views_ui

Following are details of the comparison:

Anonymous user

	Drupal 7 (Requests per sec)	Drupal 7 with extra modules (Requests per sec)	Drupal 8(Requests per sec)
No caches enabled	44.44	38.67	14.34
APC enabled (shm_size=64)	164.61	150.40	30.00
APC enabled Page cache maxium age=1 min (Drupal 8) Use internal page cache (Drupal 8) Cache pages for anonymous users (Drupal 7) Minimum cache lifetime=1 min (Drupal 7)	1185.81	1152.53	362.91
Page cache maxium age=1 min (Drupal 8) Use internal page cache (Drupal 8) Cache pages for anonymous users (Drupal 7) Minimum cache lifetime=1 min (Drupal 7)	414.20	315.95	115.06

Login as administrator

	Drupal 7 (Requests per sec)	Drupal 7 with extra modules (Requests per sec)	Drupal 8(Requests per sec)
No caches enabled	44.27	37.09	17.71
APC enabled (shm_size=64)	161.34	143.39	37.55
APC enabled Page cache maxium age=1 min (Drupal 8) Use internal page cache (Drupal 8) Cache pages for anonymous users (Drupal 7) Minimum cache lifetime=1 min (Drupal 7)	160.77	145.08	37.53
Page cache maxium age=1 min (Drupal 8) Use internal page cache (Drupal 8) Cache pages for anonymous users (Drupal 7) Minimum cache lifetime=1 min (Drupal 7)	44.19	38.01	17.55

As you can see in my results, the performance regression still remains. I am hoping in few more months, once the beta versions start getting released, the performance will improve.

If you have conducted performance tests related to Drupal I would be interested in looking at the results; please leave me a link in the comments section. I am specifically interested in the following for now:

• Performance comparison of a standard out of the box Drupal site when it is run on Amazon EC2 vs Google Compute Engine
• Performance comparison of a Drupal site (with x number of modules) when it is run on different Instance sizes on Amazon EC2.
• Performance comparison of a Drupal site (with x number of modules) when it is run on different machines on Google Compute Engine.