Textpattern vs WordPress Based on the Real Using Experience

hcgtv · 2015-06-22 16:16:54

Textpattern falls behind WordPress when it comes to comparing the performance of both of these programs.

The above line is from Textpattern vs WordPress Based on the Real Using Experience.

The person doing the article is named Susan Rosie, she’s obviously never installed Textpattern.

Her site PHPMatters runs Wordpress, I guess PHP doesn’t much matter to her ;)

colak · 2015-06-22 16:35:58

hcgtv wrote #291821:

Her site PHPMatters runs Wordpress, I guess PHP doesn’t much matter to her ;)

No mention re vulnerabilities either:)

gaekwad · 2015-06-22 16:54:28

Hey Bert – she was also a spammer on this site, too – I remember deleting her posts with backlinks.

The whole site is an affiliate marketing kit for web hosting referrals.

hcgtv · 2015-06-22 17:18:08

gaekwad wrote #291827:

The whole site is an affiliate marketing kit for web hosting referrals.

That’s what I gathered also, cheap way to make money, lie about sh*t.

gaekwad · 2015-06-22 17:21:03

hcgtv wrote #291832:

That’s what I gathered also, cheap way to make money, lie about sh*t.

Web hosting referral bounties are sizeable. Couple that with Wordpress powering >25% of websites and people wanting hosting as cheaply as possible, there’s a reason why they push Bluehost so hard.

I have the burden of knowledge from affiliate marketing. Done it since 2006. It’s a murky world if you’re not careful.

michaelkpate · 2015-06-23 02:05:34

However, the users of Textpattern find it difficult to use the software. Therefore, all the beginners are recommended to use WordPress due to its little learning curve of the learning for the basics of blogging and writing.

That barely sounds like English.

gaekwad · 2015-06-23 09:16:20

Of course, by answering Bert, we’re all validating the link back to her website, so she’s still winning.

colak · 2015-06-24 05:46:10

Did anyone do any benchmarks with vanilla installs of the latest txp and wp versions?

ie.

RAM usage
speed
footprint
known vulnerabilities
etc

philwareham · 2015-06-24 07:07:56

colak wrote #291919:

Did anyone do any benchmarks with vanilla installs of the latest txp and wp versions?

This would be handy to know. Anyone?

hcgtv · 2015-06-24 13:11:12

http://jessie/
VirtualBox: Intel Dual Core (3.0GHz), 2GB of ram
Debian GNU/Linux 8.1 “jessie” – Apache 2.4.10 – MySQL 5.5.43 – PHP 5.6.9

Textpattern 4.5.7:

bert@jessie:~$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://jessie/textpattern/
Server Software:        Apache/2.4.10
Server Hostname:        jessie
Server Port:            80
Document Path:          /textpattern/
Document Length:        9797 bytes
Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   1.817 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      996700 bytes
HTML transferred:       979700 bytes
Requests per second:    55.02 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       181.747 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       18.175 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          535.55 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    4  15.2      0      77
Processing:    91  169  72.5    158     597
Waiting:       80  148  68.7    137     578
Total:         91  173  76.6    159     597
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    159
  66%    176
  75%    187
  80%    190
  90%    215
  95%    254
  98%    565
  99%    597
 100%    597 (longest request)

WordPress 4.2.2:

bert@jessie:~$ ab -n 100 -c 10 http://jessie/wordpress/
Server Software:        Apache/2.4.10
Server Hostname:        jessie
Server Port:            80
Document Path:          /wordpress/
Document Length:        8850 bytes
Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   6.621 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      906800 bytes
HTML transferred:       885000 bytes
Requests per second:    15.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       662.121 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       66.212 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          133.74 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    3  12.0      0      68
Processing:   287  647 189.4    597    1260
Waiting:      269  576 188.4    523    1204
Total:        287  651 192.2    599    1260
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    599
  66%    620
  75%    628
  80%    645
  90%    984
  95%   1183
  98%   1239
  99%   1260
 100%   1260 (longest request)

bert@jessie:~$ rm -r /home/www/wordpress

Last edited by hcgtv (2015-06-24 13:16:20)

Bloke · 2015-06-24 13:22:38

hcgtv wrote #291953:

rm -r /home/www/wordpress

lol :-)

Nice comparison though, thanks Bert. Based on these findings, it seems a stock Textpattern has around four times the mean transfer rate out of the gate than WordPress, despite the latter having a smaller document size. I call that a result and we hope to maintain or improve that with an improved parser and optimisations at some point.

gaekwad · 2015-06-24 14:29:29

Bloke wrote #291955:

I call that a result and we hope to maintain or improve that with an improved parser and optimisations at some point.

I secretly (OK, not so secretly) wish that one day the Textpattern vs WordPress stop. They are not helpful, in the main, because they’re aimed at two very different demographics each with wildly different needs. A stock Textpattern vs a stock Wordpress? Nobody I know of has either of those in production.

WordPress was a fork of b2. I know this because I was a user of b2 when Matt Mullenweg forked it and announced WordPress v1. The emphasis is, and always has been, on ease of use and being accessible to as many people as possible to make websites as easy as possible. As a result of this, WordPress powers approximately 1 in 4 websites. I’ve seen stats to say that it accounts for 3 out of every 5 websites where the CMS is known. That’s amazing and terrifying at the same time.

I have heard anecdotally that the quality of code in Wordpress is not great. Some people say it’s bad. I know anecdotally, and also from some previous comparisons that Wordpress (typically) uses more memory than Textpattern out of the gate.

Automattic, the folks behind WordPress, pump a lot of time, resources and developers into making something that makes them a whole bunch of money. People spin up Wordpress, apply a theme, optionally add some plugins where core code doesn’t quite cut it, and they’re on the air. That’s it. Done. Save for the scintillating blog content and cat pics, that’s it. Wordpress runs on low-end hosting, Textpattern runs on low-end hosting. Most people use low-end hosting. Go figure.

When I upload a new Wordpress for my clients, about 18MB goes up the pipes to get up and running. Textpattern is about 2MB, and I know I can strip about 30% of that back if I need a super-minimal Textpattern instance on a very slow connection. Textpattern is, as near as makes no difference, about one ninth the size of Wordpress. There is no fair feature/speed comparison here, whatever way you look at it.

For me, it’s as much about the bytes in a file as the people involved. From my perspective, I know Robert, Stef, Phil and Jukka are on the board of development and design. They all know far more than I do about all kinds of things. They all have day jobs (I assume), lives outside of Textpattern and all the drama that accompanies it. They all have, I’m sure, a lot more on their Textpattern to-do lists that either a) I know about or b) they tell everyone about.

I have a tribal loyalty to Textpattern. It’s what I’ve used for almost a decade. I write about Textpattern. I teach people how to use it properly. I make website for people. I fix other websites where a dev has set it up, lost interest, and left the client in a yellowy 4.3-era hinterland. I come here when I can (which is not as often as I’d like) and see what’s happening, try to help a few people and delete a glob of spam if I get here before 0900UTC. That’s my current involvement.

I find the whole Textpattern project tricky, personally challenging and often frustrating. It makes me mad, sometimes. I’ve stopped wondering whether it’s just me that gets like this, or whether I give an open source software project too much space in my head. When I met up with Stef a month or so ago, we talked about Textpattern and I left the pub feeling a bit bewildered. There’s a hell of a lot achieved from the time and expertise of relatively few people. That’s also amazing and terrifying at the same time. The respect I have for the developers and designer is high, but I am always reminded that there are 4 people on that list. Four. How many tens of thousands of sites ultimately depend on those people? I don’t know. I make sure my Textpatterns ping textpattern.com to send a heartbeat, but for all I know I could be one of a thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, or a million websites. How big is Textpattern? Does it even matter? Shrug.

I wish there was a project manager and that they were more visible. I wish there was less of a reliance on Dean Allen for the textpattern.com domain. I wish there was enough of a project metabolism to gee-up more people to get involved in contributing, which would add more features and better usability, which would get more people involved, which would create the cycle to grow. I wish there were two or three more people actively committing enhancements to the 4.6-dev code so it becomes more of a realistic proposition for the future. I wish I knew how far along the 4.6 release roadmap we are.

I wish. I wish. I wish.

I wish I could actively contribute more useful stuff. I can’t code, and although I’m almost at the point where I’ve convinced myself I should learn, that moment hasn’t yet arrived. I make small changes to language packs, I’ve made attempts at increasing community involvement in various things – none of which appear to have had much traction – and I’m really struggling with my role in this project, if indeed there is one for me. All of this frustration has clearly just boiled over into a forum post that sounds like I’m two clicks away from a ragequit.

Someone tell me I’m overreacting and need a nap.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2015-06-22 16:16:54