Benchmarks, hot off the Pressflow

Independent benchmarks by Josh Koenig from Chapter Three show a 3000x throughput increase and a 40x load reduction moving from plain Drupal to Pressflow + Varnish. His testing was performed on a small Amazon EC2 instance, demonstrating how Pressflow can deliver internet-scale performance on modest, inexpensive hardware. Pressflow is able to deliver this class of performance because it’s optimized to support Varnish and other enterprise-grade web infrastructure tools in ways that standard Drupal cannot.

With Pressflow’s API compatibility with Drupal, Josh’s move from Drupal to Pressflow on his project didn’t require any coding or extensive testing. He just replaced Drupal core with Pressflow. (It’s no harder than a minor Drupal update.)

For single-server setups in the Amazon EC2 cloud, Josh’s Project Mercury AMI provides a click-and-run, configured setup with the Pressflow + Varnish stack. For more complex setups, Four Kitchens provides infrastructure consulting services on the Pressflow system.