One of the main advantages of a statically generated blog (like Octopress) over a blogging platform that uses a database (WordPress, Drupal) is performance.
My humble blog doesn’t get enough traffic for performance to be a consideration and I thought I wouldn’t be able to discern any improvement.
This graph is from Google Webmaster Tools. Can you guess when the blog migration from Drupal to Octopress was done ? Yes - that’s right - the middle of September (17th to be precise).
Undeniably, the performance is much better (fastest response time of 128 milliseconds) and reliable since the move to Octopress. Unfortunately, this ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison isn’t ideal. Previously, the blog was running Drupal 7, configured with a small number of modules using MySQL and hosted on cheap ($6 a month) shared hosting with Bluehost.
The performance spikes (high of 2.5 seconds to access a page !) are probably related to high usage of the Linux server my blog was co-hosted on (rather than a specific Drupal performance problem).
When I migrated to Octopress, I also moved the blog to Amazon S3 storage so it’s not entirely clear how much S3 has contributed to the relatively stable and fast response times of the blog since mid-September.
With hindsight, I really wish I had phased the migration by deploying Octopress for a month on the same Bluehost hosting (using rsync) and then moved to Amazon S3. Still, it’s a but late for that now.
However, it looks like I am ready for the SlashDot effect.