Benchmark #1: Admin

GD Star Rating is one of the biggest plugin currently available for WordPress. And some users were concerned about impact of this plugin to website performance. So, I decided to benchmark GD Star Rating in last 3 major versions of WordPress. All the tests are conducted in the same time as the general admin area tests published on Dev4Press. So, the setup used for testing GD Star Rating is the same, and details of used plugins, server and other things can be found here.

All test are done on 3 different WP versions (2.6.5, 2.7.1 and 2.8) in 3 different stats. Clean versions had only GD Press Tools activated (used for measurements), GDSR version had GD Press Tools and GD Star Rating active and third one, Full, had all 15 test plugins active. For each of 3 tested pages, first 3 bars are with only GD Press Tools, next 3 are with GD Press Tools and GD Star Rating active, and last 3 are with all 15 plugins active.

Load times (seconds)

Page load times

First thing measured is the time needed for server to prepare the page. As you can see dashboard takes the longest to load. When all plugins are active WP 2.8 is very, very slow.

As for the GD Star Rating, activating it adds less than 10% to the load time without the plugin. All 15 plugins have considerable impact to load time in WP 2.8. Hopefully 2.8.1 will improve on this, and WP 2.8.1 should be faster.

Used memory

Used memory (MB)

More important tests are tests on how much memory PHP uses to generates a single page. This value depends on the page, and on number of plugins loaded, as you can see on the next chart.

As you can see, GD Star Rating adds approx. 4 MB depending on the page, adding all 15 plugins adds some 12-13 MB. Considering the size of the plugin, number of features, 4 MB on admin pages is not much considering that this has minor impact on page generation speed.

Dashboard in WP 2.8 uses too much memory when you have a lot of plugins active, and we wait for 2.8.1 that should fix that problem.

Page size (KB)

Page size

Fully generated page size is the next. WP 2.8 is much better than 2.7.1, much the same as for the main Dev4Press tests. The reason for this is better optimization and compression of JavaScript and CSS.

Currently GD Star Rating is not the best in terms of external files optimizations, but that will change.

Conclusions

WP 2.6.5 tests are here only as a reference, because it can’t be really compared to WP 2.7 and WP 2.8 because interface is changed, as well as many other things. GD Star Rating impact on speed, memory use and page size is consistent in all 3 tested WordPress versions, and as you can see there is room for improvements.

In the next few versions, I will improve loading of JavaScript and CSS files and that will reduce page size. Also, memory footprint on admin pages will be reduced with better optimization of loading different plugin modules.

But real question is how much impact plugin  has on actual blog pages. And that will be covered in the next post you can expect to be published by the end of the week.

1. 

   Ray says:

   June 29, 2009 at 11:48 PM

   Good to hear you’re trying to increase the memory footprint and optimizing the JS/CSS files!

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2. 

   Erika says:

   June 30, 2009 at 12:10 AM

   I’d love to have a way to display the top XX posts per YY. For example, what were the top 10 posts for each week this year. Is this possible?

   Thanks,
   Erika

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   • 

     MillaN says:

     June 30, 2009 at 1:13 AM

     It’s possible but not directly with this plugin. All data is in database, and you can always make a special code to get weekly results. I am always available for custom development if you need something special done. Check Premium Support pages.

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3. 

   sue says:

   July 20, 2009 at 1:42 AM

   I always read your amazing website every week, its great fun and got lots of interesting information to take in and lots of interesting articles.

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