Statistics
Drupal download statistics
Last year around this time, I shared the download statistics of Drupal core so I figured that an update was in order. It looks like last year, from May 2006 to April 2007, Drupal core was downloaded more than 600,000 times.
Drupal 5: performance
With the release of Drupal 5, you might be wondering which version of Drupal is faster -- the latest release in the Drupal 4 series, or the new Drupal 5?
Experimental setup
I setup a Drupal 4.7 site with 2,000 users, 5,000 nodes, 5,000 path aliases, 10,000 comments and 250 vocabulary terms spread over 15 vocabularies.
Next, I configured the main page to show 10 nodes, enabled some blocks in both the left and the right sidebar, setup some primary links, and added a search function at the top of the page. I also setup a contact page using Drupal's contact module. The image below depicts how my final main page was configured.
Furthermore, I made an exact copy of the Drupal 4.7 site and upgraded it to the latest Drupal 5 release. The result is two identical websites; one using Drupal 4.7 and one using Drupal 5.
Benchmarks were conducted on a 3 year old Pentium IV 3Ghz with 2 GB of RAM running Gentoo Linux. I used a single tier web architecture with the following software: Apache 2.0.58, PHP 5.1.6 with APC, and MySQL 5.0.26. No special configuration or tweaking was done other than what was strictly necessary to get things up and running. My setup was CPU-bound, not I/O-bound or memory-bound.
Apache's ab2 with 20 concurrent clients was used to compute how many requests per second the above setup was capable of serving.
Drupal.org site statistics
Like it or not, but with 2007 around the corner, it is almost reflections and predictions time again. With that in mind, you might find the graphs below to be a source of inspiration.
The past growth in absolute numbers. The "January 2007"-kink is due to the fact that data for December 2006 is not yet available at this point.
The past growth in relative numbers. In 2005, the number of nodes and comments grew by more than 300%. In 2006, the number of nodes and comments grew by more than 230%.
A growth projection using a polynomial fit (multiple regression). Simply put, the correlation coefficient R-square, is a measure for the quality of the fit. R-square can assume values between 0 and 1, where a value of 1 indicates a perfect fit. Bear in mind that a statistical fit may be anything but an accurate prediction of future growth.
CMS usage
Between June 15th and July 15th, SitePoint and Ektron conducted a survey about the state of web development. In total 5,000 web professionals took the survey and the results are made available in a yearly report. One of the questions was: for your web projects, what is the primary type of web content management system (CMS) you use?
Source: 2006 State of Web Development, SitePoint Pty Ltd. and Ektron, Inc., August 2006.
Drupal vs Joomla: popularity
Google trends is a tool that analyzes Google web searches and that can visualize search trends over time using so called "search-volume graphs". These graphs usually provide a good mechanism to compare the popularity of two or more products.
Here is the search-volume graph that compares Drupal and Joomla:
It is worth pointing out that Joomla has been around a lot longer than the graph suggests. In 2005, the bulk of Mambo's core developers left Mambo and started Joomla after a dispute with Miro Corporation, the company that founded Mambo. Keep this in mind when interpreting the graph. (I tried adding Mambo to the graph but the term Mambo isn't unique to Mambo, the content management system.)
That said, you can see that Joomla is more popular than Drupal, and that Joomla has been growing a lot faster. Why? The general consensus is that Joomla has a more appealing balance between functionality, flexibility, performance, quality of code, ease of use, documentation, user interface design, support and product marketing.
I want to add that Drupal is not trying to compete with Joomla. We are actually pretty good at ignoring the competition, and just do what we think is best to do. Regardless, there is significant overlap in functionality and many of our users ask questions about the differences between both ...
Drupal vs Joomla: hosting costs
Sun's new Fire T1000 and T2000 servers are much touted for their low power consumption. According to the Sun Fire T2000 power calculator, an idle Sun Fire T2000 with 4 cores and 8GB of memory consumes 203 watts, and a busy one consumes 251 watts, resulting in a difference of 48 watts.
Now, hosting companies pay something like one dollar per month in power and cooling costs for every 6 watts of power used. Thus, a Sun Fire T2000 costs 33.83 USD per month (203 watts divided by 6.00 watts/USD/month), and a busy one costs 41.83 USD per month (251 watts divided by 6.00 watts/USD/month).
Imagine that you have one such machine for your Drupal website and one such machine for your Joomla website. Now, say that the Drupal website is on average 100 times more efficient than the Joomla website (a theoretical example) and that the Drupal machine's workload is 0.8%, while the Joomla machine's workload is 80%. That means that the monthly cost to power and cool your server is 33.90 USD per month (203 / 6 + (0.008 * 48 / 6)) for Drupal and 40.23 USD per month (203 / 6 + (0.8 * 48 / 6)) for Joomla.
In this simplified and hypothetical example, you save 6.33 USD per month by choosing Drupal over Joomla, or 75.96 USD per year! Three years will save 227.88 USD. ;-)
That, and Greenpeace will love you! (Greenpeace UK, by the way, has chosen Drupal as their platform of choice.)
Drupal vs Joomla: performance
Which content management system is faster? Drupal or Joomla?
Experimental setup
I used the "Apache, mod_php, PHP4, APC" configuration from previous benchmark experiments to compare the performance of Drupal and Joomla on a 3 year old Pentium IV 3Ghz with 2 GB of RAM running Gentoo Linux. I used the following software: Apache 2.0.55, PHP 4.4.2, MySQL 4.1.4, Drupal 4.7.3 and Joomla 1.0.10.
I simply downloaded and installed the latest stable release of both Drupal and Joomla, and tried my best to make them act and look the same. To do so, I enabled the login form and the "Who's online" block. I also setup two links and a search widget in the top menu, enabled the hit counters for posts, and setup identical footers. Next, I created one author, one category and one post as shown in the images below.
Apache's ab2 was used to compute how many requests per second both systems are capable of serving. The page was requested 1000 times with a concurrency of 5 (i.e. ab2 -n 1000 -c 5). To test the impact of gzip-compressing pages we specified whether ab2 can accept gzip-compressed pages (i.e. ab2 -n 1000 -c 5 -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip;"). Note that ab2 did not request any images or CSS files; only the dynamically generated HTML document was retrieved.
Requests per second
When caching is disabled Joomla can serve 19 pages per second, while Drupal can serve 13 pages per second. Hence, Joomla is 44% faster than Drupal.
However, when caching is enabled Joomla can serve 21 pages per second, while Drupal can serve 67 pages per second. Here, Drupal is 319% faster than Joomla.
In other words, Joomla's cache system improves performance by 12%, while Drupal's cache system improves performance by 508%.
It is important to note that Drupal can only serve cached pages to anonymous visitors (users that have not logged on). Once users have logged on, caching is disabled for them since the pages are personalized in various ways. Hence, in practice, Drupal might not be 319% faster than Joomla; it depends on the ratio of anonymous visitors versus authenticated visitors, how often your site's page cache is flushed, and the hit-rate of your Drupal page cache.
Lastly, when serving gzip-compressed pages Drupal becomes slightly faster compared to having to serve non-compressed pages. Joomla, on the other hand, becomes a little bit slower. The reason is that Drupal's page cache stores its content directly in a compressed state; it has to uncompress the page when the client does not support gzip-compression, but can serve a page directly from the page cache when the client does support gzip-compression.
Document length
The first figure shows that the cost of compressing or uncompressing pages is neglible. The second picture shows that it can, however, have significant impact on the document length, and hence, on bandwidth usage.
Drupal always attempts to send compressed pages. Joomla, on the other hand, doesn't compress pages unless this option is explicitly turned on.
