Choosing between Memcached or Redis for your WordPress cache is a tough decision. Not because they have vastly different performance profiles (they don’t), but because either choice is a good one depending on your needs. In this post we’re going to explore the differences between Redis and Memcached, how they perform for WordPress, and a lot of different non-performance things you should consider when making your choice.
What is Memcached?
Memcached is an open-source, high performance, distributed memory object caching system. What does that mean? It means you can store a bunch of strings in memory and access them really fast. From a WordPress perspective, it means that using a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache we can store the results of the complicated SQL queries that WordPress does in memory and have them available instantly.
What is Redis?
Redis is an open source in-memory store that can be used as a cache or a message broker. It’s a bit different then Memcached because you get a lot more out of the box with it. For example, Redis has built in replication, transactions, disk persistence, and provides high availability and partitioning. All those features means that managing WordPress can be a little harder to do, but not much harder. Especially if you just need to use it as a cache.
Performance
Both Redis and Memcached have excellent performance. They’re both used by some of the largest websites in the world and are fully ingrained in the Fortune 500. Given that all things are not created equal, let’s see how they perform with a read-heavy WordPress site (this blog).
The Setup
The load tests are performed against the DigitalOcean WordPress Marketplace image with either Redis or Memcached installed alongside of it. The machines have 2 vCPUs, 2 GB RAM and live in DigitalOcean’s SFO2 (San Francisco) data center.
The load test configuration:
- 500 concurrent users
- 2 users / second ramp up
- 45 minute test ( ran twice )
- Traffic comes from Digital Ocean’s NYC3 data center.
The content of the load test is a copy of this blog.
Baseline Performance (No Cache)
The baseline performance for WordPress with no cache isn’t great.
The response time also isn’t great. A little over 2 seconds on average.
Redis Performance
Once we install Redis and configure W3 Total Cache to use it, the number of requests that we can handle increases substantially.
The requests remain steady at around 300 per second and no failures are recorded. The response time also improves quite a bit.
475ms isn’t bad at all. That’s 4 times faster response times then without any caching at all.
Memcached Performance
With Memcached installed and W3 Total Cache configured to use it, we see some excellent performance.
In this situation, Memcached performs even better then Redis with 425 req/s versus Redis’ 300 req/s. Response time improvements are similar.
The Memcached response time is almost 3 times faster than the Redis response time. In general, the results where Memcached is faster than Redis are surprising. In most benchmarks Redis is equal or faster than Memcached, so it’s likely a configuration problem.
Other Considerations
When deciding what cache to use with your WordPress setup, there are a few other considerations your should be looking at:
- Ease of setup – As you can see from the performance results above, Memcached has better performance out of the box. Knowing what I know about Redis this is likely a configuration issue, but the fact that I could get that level of performance with no configuration from Memcached is a good data point.
- 3rd Party Hosting – Do you really want to manage your own Redis or Memcached server? If you don’t, you’ll want to look at the landscape of 3rd party providers. Redis has a robust provider ecosystem. Memcached’s is a little less robust.
- Persistence – Do you need your cache to survive a reboot? This is important if the cost of re-populating your cache is too high for your system. If you do need persistence, Redis is your best option.
- High Availability – If you need high availability of your caching cluster, Redis is the clear winner here. Memcached can be made to operate this way, but Redis has it baked in to the core of the application.
If you’d like to see the full results of the load testing runs on Kernl, see the links below.