Server response by plugin

Do you know what effect a plugin has on your server response? The chart below compares the effect of the 12 most popular plugins ( measured by total downloads ) against a “vanilla” install.

Analysis

Some plugins can seriously impact the server response of your website.

  • They do this for every single request to the website.
  • Some of them adversely affect the performance even when not needed.
  • Click on the chart labels to see the worst offenders.
  • Now ask yourself if you really need the plugin.

Method used

  • Configure oik-bwtrace to produce a daily trace summary. Deactivate other tracing.
  • Using slog driver, run a series of 100 requests to the same URL, recording the output in a daily trace summary file called vanilla.
  • For each of the top 12 plugins
    • activate the plugin
    • run the same requests, recording the output in the appropriately named daily trace summary file.
    • deactivate the plugin
  • Use slog compare to visualise the results.

The above figures were produced on 1st January 2021, with WordPress 5.8, PHP 8.0. The requested post contained "Top 12 perf test".


Summary file