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".