Deciding to power WordPress with Aurora was easy. Amazon Aurora is a drop-in MySQL replacement built and managed by AWS that comes with unparalleled speed, scalability, and durability.
To start our migration and upgrade, we began performance testing and focused on a few areas like admin performance, publishing, reads, and errors. What we found is that the more we pushed Aurora, it still delivered. It was impressive to watch this new system from AWS handle traffic intelligently and in a way that’s easy to manage.
Shifter is now fully migrated with Amazon Aurora and our latest generation tests resulted in zero errors of a large WordPress site containing 3,500 pages. Before, the generators powering Shifter from RDS with EFS had difficulty finishing this task at all.
MySQL 5.7 on EFS vs Amazon Aurora 5.6
System
- PHP version 7.0 (HTTPd 2.4 – mod_php)
- WordPress Version: 4.3.4
- PHP files placed on EFS
- Number of posts: 10
Database Types
- MySQL 5.7 on EFS
- Amazon Aurora 5.6
Tools and Environment
- Sending requests to Shifter from remote testing server: loader.io.
- Increase simultaneous HTTP connections for 1 minute from 1 to 20.
- Requesting front page of the WordPress site Login to the dashboard (/wp-admin/) and list posts.
Results
We experienced performance boosts of 1.5 to 6 times faster throughout the following scenarios. The graphs show that Aurora makes a faster response for first requests. The average requests (blue lined graph) on Aurora are linear compared to EFS, which shows Auroras is high stability against the non-cached requests.
We think this is going to have a big impact on the user experience.
The key factors and benefits from moving to Aurora for us were the admin response time. It’s much more fluid now and lets users focus on their content quicker than before without irritation. Aurora also shortens the time for users to generate their sites and deploy.
Requesting front page with MySQL on EFS
Requesting front page with Amazon Aurora
Log in and list posts with RDS on EFS
Log in and list posts with Amazon Aurora
