25 Feb 2013 ralsina   » (Master)

Load Testing Nikola

Nikola generates static sites, so load testing it is not very interesting, except as a benchmark for the difference between static and dynamic sites.

Today I was told about blitz.io and since a quick test is free, I thought, why not? The result is quite impressive: a cheap VPS, using gatling as a web server, which is almost configuration-free and not meant for extremely high loads, can handle roughly 9 million daily hits.

Let me say that again: 9 million hits. On a unconfigured $5 server. Here's the report

How much tuning does it take for a wordpress instance to serve that? On what hardware?

And that's only half the picture. Not only are Nikola's static pages incredibly light on your server, we have also spent a lot of effort trying to make individual pages load fast, for a better user experience. Some of the techniques used for fast-loading sites are:

  • Using webassets to bundle CSS and JS into single files.
  • Automatic support for CDNs for the common JS libraries
  • Support for transparently using HTML/CSS/JS/Image compression tools

So, if you try something like YSlow! on a Nikola site, it will give you a score of roughly 93 up to 98 (out of 100) depending on your webserver configuration.

BTW: I really want to get that up to 100. Really want it

So, remember, if your site can be served statically, it's going to be cheaper, faster, safer. And if you ever get 9 million hits a day, it will be available.

Disclaimer:
Blitz.io is sending me a t-shirt ;-)

Syndicated 2013-02-25 17:34:16 from Lateral Opinion

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