I present you a benchmark comparison test between the latest Joomla 2.5.4 Emper (stable) and the upcoming Elxis 4.0 Nautilus (pre-alpha). The tests performed with the Apache's ab tool on my local development computer which runs Windows. The numbers shown might seem low, this is because of the Windows. On a Linux live server they would be higher but the comparisson results would be the same. A quick conclusion (we will go in more details later) is that Elxis is, at least, 4 times faster than Joomla!

Tests enviroment

Web server: Apache 2.2.17
PHP version: 5.3.5
ApacheBench: 2.3
OS: Windows Vista 64bit Home Premium Edition Service Pack 2
Joomla: 2.5.4 Ember stable
Elxis: 4.0 Nautilus rev1140 pre-alpha

Tests methodology

Both Elxis and Joomla are with their default content. Note that Elxis default installation has more content and modules than joomla, so Elxis is heavier. Even that you will see bellow that it performs much better! I executed the same ab command on both Elxis and Joomla. I did this twice and get the best result from each run. The tests performed against CMS's frontpage with and without cache. I also did a benchmark comparisson test on a sample article on each CMS. The caching options used are: Without cache, with file cache and with APC cache. Note that Elxis uses APC only for opcode caching, not for content. For content (modules only) it uses file caching. So for the Elxis APC we have opcode caching with APC and modules caching with file cache.

Comparison results

The graph bellow shows the comparison results for the Requests per second option of the benchmark results. It is clear that Elxis bits Joomla! Elxis is faster than joomla even if we compare Elxis without cache and joomla with the best caching option, APC. If you wish you can get the complete tests results to study them. Note also that Elxis is still under development. The final version will perform even better!

Why Elxis is faster?

Elxis is faster than Joomla because it is smart and wise. Elxis code is totally hand written by the Elxis Team and is of the highest quality you will find in an open source project. It is well organized, optimized and generates no errors, warnings and notices even with the strictest standards enabled. When APC is enabled Elxis reduces the database queries in the frontpage to the ridiculous number of 3 (yes, you read correctly, just three)!

Elxis also loads wisely the extensions. Content plugins and modules get loaded only if they needed from a central location and are ready to run when requested. On the other hand Joomla loads and executes, for example, plugins even if they are unpublished or not used in an article. Elxis has only 2 global extension types: Components and Modules. All others are component specific (search engines, authentication methods, content plugins). Joomla has a chaotic extensions system with 11 different plugin types.

Elxis 4.0 for heavy loaded sites

One of our main goals when we started developing Elxis 4.0 was to perform well on large scale sites. The Elxis installation used on this benchmark comparison test, except of the default content, has 2932 more articles! On the other hand Joomla has 69 only articles. And Elxis is, at least, 4 times faster! This clearly shows that are goal has been achived. It would be interesting to see how Elxis performs on a faster online server and with a faster web server like nginx. I will soon do this test too. At the end I present you the screenshots of the last 2 tests for the unbelievers...