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While working through some issues this weekend and preparing another blog post, I finally got around to doing some comprehensive benchmarking on Project Mercury. In the process, I discovered that the first bottleneck I hit running tests from my desktop was the local (last-mile) internet connection, so I switched to running the tests from another EC2 instance. This means that network is not a factor in my results, giving us a real sense of the raw power behind this stack.

For all these tests, I used the Mercury Alpha4 release on a small ec2 instance, loading a staging copy of Mission Bicycles, which is a good "heavy" example in that it has a lot of modules loaded, including Ubercart and Panels. My goal was to measure throughput and response times under various caching configurations, angling for the best results in terms of pages served per second, and delivery time.

I started by cutting things all the way back to nothing, and then added each layer of the caching infrastructure, running benchmarks at each point. The results are quite eye-opening. Can you say 2000+ requests per second? Read on for the full story.

Interesting post about caching for drupal.org by Narayan Newton (nnewton) at http://nnewton.org/node/9

These days I've added a feature table to Caching: Modules that make Drupal scale, this group's wiki page for comparison of performance and scalability modules, started by Mike Carper some time ago.

This follows other Drupal module comparison pages, trying to make it simple and clear for most normal cases, so that a majority of users can easily understand the basics and use them. Anyone can naturally share additional info. Let's hope the wiki will be useful for Drupal users.