Are DigitalOcean Premium Droplets Better for WordPress?

Back on February 23, 2021 DigitalOcean announced the launch of their “premium” droplets. These Droplets are in the same tier as their shared-resource counterparts, but running on next generation Intel or AMD hardware. As soon as these were released, my first thought was “I wonder if WordPress runs better on these premium droplets?”. I ran 12 different load tests over the course of a week to answer that question, so let’s get started!

Want to load test your own WordPress site? Try out Kernl.

DigitalOcean Intel Premium Droplet Performance

What droplets were tested?

Testing every single droplet type would be a little to much effort for a blog post, so we did a sampling that represents two different droplet categories: single CPU, multiple CPU.

1GB RAM, 1 vCPU
- Basic
- AMD – NVMe SSD, 3200MHz memory
- Intel – NVMe SSD, 2900MHz memory
2GB RAM, 2vCPU
- Basic
- AMD – NVMe SSD, 3200MHz memory
- Intel – NVMe SSD, 2900MHz memory

You can read more details about the difference between droplets here.

How were the load tests structured?

When performing load tests it’s important to make sure that your test criteria and configuration are consistent across multiple test runs. To that end, a droplet snapshot was created with the following specs:

Ubuntu 20.10
Nginx 1.18 proxying requests to PHP-FPM
PHP 7.4.9
MariaDB 10.3
Redis 6.0.6

The snapshot was configured with a WordPress site that either had caching enabled/disabled (W3 Total Cache) and a copy of this blog as the content. From there it was trivial to spin up new droplets for load testing.

Outcomes (1vCPU, 1GB RAM)

For each CPU type we tested, we did two different tests:

Uncached for 30 minutes with 100 users
Cached for 50 minutes to 250 users

Type	Cached?	Users	Duration	Total Requests	Response Time	p95
Basic	no	100	30	96397	793	950
AMD	no	100	30	126500	361	450
Intel	no	100	30	68338	1547	2000
Basic	yes	250	50	666506	72	75
AMD	yes	250	50	669634	70	72
Intel	yes	250	50	664306	72	74

AMD coming in HOT

The most interesting outcome in all of these scenarios was during the uncached tests. AMD outperforms the premium Intel by 2x and the premium Intel under performed the basic droplet. Given that these droplets are shared resources, it’s likely a noisy neighbor was causing performance degradation in this particular instance. But when looking at the 2vCPU performance (next section), you’ll see that AMD performing better than Intel seems consistent.

For the WordPress workloads that are easily cached, it doesn’t appear that the premium droplets make any significant different. Response times are similar, total requests are similar, and the p95 response time is similar as well.

For WordPress workloads that are only single CPU and not cached, the AMD processor is the clear winner. It delivers nearly 2x the performance for a 15% increase in price.

DigitalOcean AMD Premium droplet performance

Outcomes (2vCPU, 2GB RAM)

For each of the CPU types we tested in the 2vCPU/2GB RAM category, we ran the following tests:

Uncached for 30 minutes with 200 users
Cached for 50 minutes with 600 users

Type	Cached?	Load Test Users	Duration	Total Requests	Avg Response Time	p95
Basic	no	200	30	170669	964	1200
AMD	no	200	30	248258	357	420
Intel	no	200	30	189312	775	880
Basic	yes	600	50	1510508	71	74
AMD	yes	600	50	1500198	70	72
Intel	yes	600	50	1504803	70	71

AMD for the win

In uncached scenarios, the AMD premium droplet out performs the premium Intel droplet significantly. The response time is roughly half and it was able to process nearly 50% more requests.

For cached scenarios there doesn’t appear to be much difference between any of the droplets. All metrics end up being roughly the same.

If you have WordPress workloads that can’t be cached easily, the AMD premium droplets are absolutely worth the slight increase in cost.

More DigitalOcean AMD Premium Droplet WordPress Performance

Conclusions

After all the tests were run, it became clear that for WordPress the AMD premium droplet on DigitalOcean is absolutely worth the extra cost associated with it. The premium Intel droplet under-performed across the board, but is still a bit better than the basic droplet.

In short, get the AMD droplet if you can afford it.

Want to load test your own WordPress site? Try out Kernl.

Appendix

Links to details about each load test are below.