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.
