The following benchmark proves that a traditional single site Drupal setup isn't any faster than its multisite counterpart.

Tested setups:

  1. Single site installation of Drupal 6.17 from Drupal.org
  2. Multisite installation of Drupal 6.6 from Debian Lenny. Although there's a version difference and Debian's release lags behind by a number of versions, it has the latest security patches applied.

Benchmark data by ApacheBench as per commands:

  1. ab -n 100 -c 10 http://drupal_single_site_address.tld
  2. ab -n 100 -c 10 http://drupal_multisite_address.tld

Clean setup without any custom modules/themes

Multisite

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   18.719 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      630476 bytes
HTML transferred:       567868 bytes
Requests per second:    5.34 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1871.879 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       187.188 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          32.89 [Kbytes/sec] received

Single site

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   18.819 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      613100 bytes
HTML transferred:       552900 bytes
Requests per second:    5.31 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1881.890 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       188.189 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          31.82 [Kbytes/sec] received

Setup with Views, IMCE and jQuery Update enabled

Multisite

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   18.185 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      625200 bytes
HTML transferred:       565000 bytes
Requests per second:    5.50 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1818.453 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       181.845 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          33.58 [Kbytes/sec] received

Single site

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   19.715 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      627644 bytes
HTML transferred:       566842 bytes
Requests per second:    5.07 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1971.458 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       197.146 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          31.09 [Kbytes/sec] received

Setup with modules and a custom theme

Multisite

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   21.767 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      891500 bytes
HTML transferred:       833500 bytes
Requests per second:    4.59 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       2176.653 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       217.665 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          40.00 [Kbytes/sec] received

Single site

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   22.031 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      874400 bytes
HTML transferred:       816400 bytes
Requests per second:    4.54 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       2203.097 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       220.310 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          38.76 [Kbytes/sec] received

Conclusion

Given the above data, it's pretty safe to say that both installations run equally well and the multisite setup isn't any worse at all. It could also be said that a native Debian setup of Drupal (apt-get install drupal6) is optimised enough to perform slightly better.

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