WordPress and Movable Type — Who is the bigger resource hog?

January 4, 2007

Here is a very interesting thread started today in the TextDrive Forums: Who’s Biggest Shared Hosting Resource Hog: WP or MT?

Doubtless due to having too much time on my hands, I’ve built two visually identical versions of a new blog that will be eventually hosted here. One version is in WordPress, the other is in Movable Type.

Personally, I don’t have any real preference for either WP or MT. But, I do have a bias for static pages, because I think (imagine?) that they’re delivered faster from a reader’s point of view. Subjectively speaking, static sites feel snappier to me than a lot of WP sites.

Hence, I’ve got two questions:

1) Side by side, on the same machine with the same browser, would Jill Reader really see a static page produced by MT before she’d see the identical page delivered by WP?

2) Which of the two platforms is most likely to run afoul of CPU/memory/etc. limits imposed by shared hosting? I know this really isn’t an issue for the typical blog with minimal readership, but let’s dream. Suppose a site does become popular. WP is going to be busy generating a lot of database queries. MT is going to be busy rebuilding some number of pages pages every time someone posts a comment. (MT won’t rebuild the entire site on its own.) I’m assuming the sites have identical content, the same posting rate, same comments, etc.

(There are plenty of complaints on the web from MT users who’ve run into problems obviously caused by excessive resource use on a shared host. But, if you look, there are also complaints from WP users who’ve run into problems.)

I’ve left comment spam out of the equation because I suspect both platforms are equally vulnerable. Akismet and other equivalent spam countermeasures are avaiable [sic] for both.

I’m shooting in the dark here, but I’m guessing that the key variable might be the comments. I.e., with few comments the edge might go to MT, but as comments increase, the rebuilds will suck more resources than the corresponding database activity will with WP.

Has anyone ever run some numbers on this?

I would love to see some great discussion around this. Will Jason weigh in? My gut tells me the Perl/CGI structure of Movable Type is the bigger resource drain, but I could be wrong.

Tagged as: Blog, MovableType, textdrive, Web, WordPress

  • Bill,

    Thanks for dropping by. I have used both MT and WordPress. I like them both. The MT rebuild process kills me everytime. Don't be a stranger!
  • wagerrard
    This is weird. I came across your pickup of my TxD forum post via a Technorati tickler I run.

    There have been disappointingly few reponses, and those boil down to "it depends", which is not at all helpful.

    I suspect you are correct that MT's Perl/CGI architecture places a greater burden on the server. After all, unless it's runing under mod_prel of FastCGI, MT launches another instance of Perl every time it hits one of those CGI scripts. (That's the reason all those MT sites were killing servers in 2004 when the comments spammers went after them. Each comment triggered a new Perl instance.)

    That's not MT's fault, though. It's Perl's fault. It made sense for Ben Trott to write MT in Perl because you could count on hosts running Perl back then, but not PHP. Times change. These days, Perl is like the strange old aunt you hope doesn't come to your birthday party. I'd like to see Six Apart retain MT's template structure, rewrite the engine in something more contemporary, and then release the Perl code as open source. If they were clever, existing MT users could upgrade to the new engine without much hassle.

    On the other hand, tools like WP may be easier on the server, but I'm not sure they're easier on the reader. Nothing is served faster than a static HTML page.

    It looks like I'll go with a WP installation this time, if for no other reason than to avoid the need to rebuild the entire site every time you make a design change under MT.
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