At work I’ve been working a lot with Windows Azure pack and the Websites role (WAPWS). This is Windows Azure for hosting providers, it allows us hosters to provide our own Azure environment on our own equipment. Meaning we can be less expensive than MS azure but provide the same service, sometimes even better. For example at GearHost we’re offering all our plans on SSD storage. WAPWS offers a few different ways to host websites. There is standard shared plans that run on multiple web nodes that are shared among sites. They also offer reserved nodes, meaning your website runs on a single node with dedicated resources. And then on top of that you can add additional nodes for your site to take advantage of through instances. Now that it’s fully deployed I did some testing with my wordpress site with and without W3 Total Cache, along with multiple instances. I only have 3 plugins currently, Akismet, Google Analyticator, and W3 Total Cache. For testing all I did was deactivate and reactivate total cache and then reset my website in WAPWS. I used apache bench to run my tests. For each test I ran 10 benches and then took the average. The numbers below are requests/second.
In W3 Total Cache I enabled Page Cache, Database Cache, Object Cache, and Browser Cache.?Each cache method is set to Opcode: Wincache. I also tested with disk, but wincache gave slightly better performance (despite ssd) so I stuck with that.
| Reserved Single Instance 100 Requests 10 Concurrent Connections | |||||||||||
| Reserved | PHP 5.5 | Without W3 Total Cache plugin | |||||||||
| Requests per second | 13.032 | ||||||||||
| Reserved | PHP 5.5 | With W3 Total Cache Wincache | |||||||||
| Requests per second | 35.418 | ||||||||||
| Shared Single Instance 100 Requests 10 Concurrent Connections | |||||||||||
| Shared | PHP 5.5 | Without W3 Total Cache plugin | |||||||||
| Requests per second | 10.993 | ||||||||||
| Shared | PHP 5.5 | With W3 Total Cache Wincache | |||||||||
| Requests per second | 35.256 | ||||||||||
The numbers above are my baseline. 100 requests with 10 concurrent isn’t a whole lot but as you can see W3 Total Cache greatly improves performance. Azure?uses instances more like processors