My Linode VPS spits out WordPress pages in 33.811ms (via ApacheBench, concurrency=10 for a couple hundred requests). I don't use any kind of content/page cache. There's no reason WordPress would be 200 times slower than your custom blog -- WordPress isn't some kind of complex software. It's a handful of very small PHP classes that choose a theme file based on the URL, include it, run a database query to select some posts, wrap the result rows in objects, and pass them to the theme to spit out. I've had hundreds of concurrent visitors on my blog without registering any load. If your site is taking 3 seconds to return a page, there's something wrong and it's not the choice of blog platform.
I meant a clean wordpress install. No themes, no plugins, just a basic install. Three seconds. My own blog does about 3 mysql queries and manages that in 8ms at best (usually 22ms at worst; typical seems to be around 15ms). The most limiting factor for Wordpress was cpu speed.
Yeah, WordPress can get slow pretty quick, but a naked install should be pretty snappy. The codebase itself is pretty small (~50kLOC) but the DB queries can get ugly depending on the plugins installed. Naked WP on GoDaddy or similary crap shared hosting site can be slow, but certainly not on a VPS.
Mostly CPU usage would jump to 100%, it's not mysql or RAM shortage. I know an Intel atom isn't much, but it ought to do better than this, especially compared to custom software.
