Niko­la gen­er­ates stat­ic sites, so load test­ing it is not very in­ter­est­ing, ex­cept as a bench­mark for the dif­fer­ence be­tween stat­ic and dy­nam­ic sites.

To­day I was told about blitz.io and since a quick test is free, I thought, why not? The re­sult is quite im­pres­sive: a cheap VP­S, us­ing gatling as a web server, which is al­most con­fig­u­ra­tion-free and not meant for ex­treme­ly high load­s, can han­dle rough­ly 9 mil­lion dai­ly hit­s.

Let me say that again: 9 mil­lion hits. On a un­con­fig­ured $5 serv­er. Here's the re­port

How much tun­ing does it take for a word­press in­stance to serve that? On what hard­ware?

And that's on­ly half the pic­ture. Not on­ly are Niko­la's stat­ic pages in­cred­i­bly light on your server, we have al­so spent a lot of ef­fort try­ing to make in­di­vid­u­al pages load fast, for a bet­ter us­er ex­pe­ri­ence. Some of the tech­niques used for fast-load­ing sites are:

• Us­ing we­bas­sets to bun­­dle CSS and JS in­­­to sin­­gle files.

• Au­­to­­mat­ic sup­­port for CDNs for the com­­mon JS li­braries

• Sup­­port for tran­s­­par­en­t­­ly us­ing HT­M­L/C­SS/JS/Im­age com­pres­­sion tools

So, if you try some­thing like YS­low! on a Niko­la site, it will give you a score of rough­ly 93 up to 98 (out of 100) de­pend­ing on your web­serv­er con­fig­u­ra­tion.

BTW: I re­al­ly want to get that up to 100. Re­al­ly want it

So, re­mem­ber, if your site can be served stat­i­cal­ly, it's go­ing to be cheap­er, faster, safer. And if you ev­er get 9 mil­lion hits a day, it will be avail­able.

Disclaimer:

Blitz.io is send­ing me a t-shirt ;-)