Benchmarks for the Display Suite module

I've been promising benchmarks for the Display Suite module after every presentation I gave so far. It took me a while to get a good setup but now it's here. I've used the demo site as a start, so there are a lot of modules enabled for this test. Views, panels, fivestar, heartbeat, comment, taxonomy, location, gmap, imagecache are the most important ones since they all integrate with the ecosphere of Display Suite modules. I added a new content type called 'benchmark' and added 14 CCK fields to it: 4 textfields, 4 textareas, 2 images, 2 filefields, 1 node reference and 1 user reference. It also has a title, body, 2 taxonomy fields, a fivestar widget and a couple of comments. Depending on the test, the complete set of modules integrating with Display suite are enabled or disabled. These include ds, ds_ui, cd, hds, nd, nd_cck, nd_search, nd_fivestar, nd_location, nd_switch_bm, ucd, ud and vd. You gotta love small project names right ?

Desktop

The first test was ran on my Fedora Core 13 desktop - Intel Core Quad, 2 GHz, 2MB RAM with php 5.2.13 and eAccelerator - ab sending 100 requests with 5 concurrent users on a single node and page caching disabled.

 Without Display Suite
 PHP 4.91 MB
 Requests per second:    36.18 [#/sec] (mean)
 Time per request:       138.202 [ms] (mean)
 Time per request:       27.640 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) 

 Build mode blocked
 PHP 5.31 MB
 Requests per second:    34.68 [#/sec] (mean)
 Time per request:       144.174 [ms] (mean)
 Time per request:       28.835 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) 

 With Display Suite
 PHP 5.33 MB
 Requests per second:    34.51 [#/sec] (mean) 
Time per request:       144.876 [ms] (mean)
 Time per request:       28.975 [ms]
 (mean, across all concurrent requests) 

Server

The second test was ran on a CentOS 5.3 - 2 x Intel Core Quad, 2,6 GHz, 8MB RAM with php 5.2.11 and eAccelerator - ab sending 100 requests from my pc to the external server with 5 concurrent users on a single node and page caching disabled.

 Without Display Suite
 PHP 4.25 MB
 Requests per second:    26.91 [#/sec] (mean)
 Time per request:       185.775 [ms] (mean)
 Time per request:       37.155 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) 

 Build mode blocked
 PHP 4.61 MB
 Requests per second:    26.76 [#/sec] (mean)
 Time per request:       187.072 [ms] (mean)
 Time per request:       37.514 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) 

 With Display Suite
 PHP 4.63 MB
 Requests per second:    26.65 [#/sec] (mean)
 Time per request:       187.642 [ms] (mean)
 Time per request:       37.828 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)) 

I knew that enabling modules would cause the memory of PHP to grow on both my desktop and the server. The server however behaves better in terms of keeping the requests per second steady per setup, so that's the real good news. I'll probably run some more in the future to see how it behaves in other situations, but I'm glad that I've got some results to show! You may lose a few microseconds, but win days of maintainability!