Presented below is a benchmark comparison test between the latest Joomla 2.5.4 Emper (stable) and the upcoming Elxis 4.0 Nautilus (pre-alpha). The tests were performed with the Apache's ab tool on my local development computer which runs Windows. The numbers shown might seem low, this is because the tests were run on a Windows operating system. On a Linux live server they would be higher but the comparison 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 environment
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 were installed and ran with their default content. Note that the Elxis default installation contains more content and modules than Joomla, so Elxis is heavier. Even so, you will see below that Elxis performs much better than Joomla! I executed the same ab command on both Elxis and Joomla. I did this twice and noted the best result from each run. The tests performed against CMS's frontpage with and without cache. I also did a benchmark comparison 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 below shows the comparison results for the Requests per second option of the benchmark results (the higher the number, the better). When looking at these numbers, it is clear that Elxis beats 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 they are available from Elxis.org. Note also that Elxis is still under development. The final version is expected to 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 with a goal of producing a CMS of the highest quality you will find in an open source project. It is well organized and optimized. When APC is enabled Elxis reduces the database queries in the frontpage to the ridiculous number of 3 (yes, you read correctly, just three), while Joomla needs 27!
Elxis also loads wisely the extensions. Content plugins and modules get loaded only if they are 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). The author believes that 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 for the CMS 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 the Elxis community's goal has been achieved. 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.
Presented below are screenshots of the last 2 tests performed in this exercise.
Additional information about Elxis can be found at the open source project's website: Elxis.org.
Editor's Note: The opinions and conclusions reached in this article are that of the author's and not necessarily from CMS Report. The author is a member of the Elxis Team and tests were not conducted by a third-party independent resource.