Since installing the Engines plugin as part of the Savage Beast setup process, I’ve been burning with curiosity about what kind of performance impact Engines would have on our production app. The cause for my concern was primarily the 100 or so lines that Engines spits out to my debug console for each and every helper method lookup. Surely, scanning through every plugin on every call to any helper can’t be the most efficient thing for us to be doing?
Tonight I ran some load tests with Apache AB to see if there was any substance to these concerns. Each test did 500 requests on a sample of three random pages from our site (running in production mode). Here were my results:
Looks like Engines is a far different beast in production vs. development (as James said). The difference between integrating SB into the app directly vs. integrating it via engines is well within the margin of error for these tests. Thus, I am no longer concerned about the marginal performance impact of Engines for the time being.
Now, on to fixing its conflict with the Exception Notifier.
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