As in almost every new release, eZ Publish is announced to perform better than the previous release This was true when 4.0 was released and also for the version 4.1. And what about the new 4.4 ?

As I wrote earlier (in french), eZ Publish brings a new session system that only creates a session when it's needed. Now, it's also possible to configure the way sessions are stored, by default the file system is used instead of the database in the previous versions. In terms of performance, this new feature is promising and since my upgrades, I find the pages more responsive but it was only a feeling.

Today, I check the crawl graphs generated by Google Webmaster Tools. The following chart shows the download time of pages by Googlebot. I think the change is quite clear (the green line represents the date of the upgrade) :

The chart of Planet eZ Publish.fr is also interesting :

it's interesting because just after the upgrade, I discovered an issue with the static cache on this site so I disabled it and as we can see, the difference between the static cache setup and the classical setup is not that big on this site!

Obviously, those results are only valid on my sites. One thing to mention is that Googlebot doesn't support session, so before eZ Publish 4.4 each time the robot requested a page, a new session was created and thus a new entry in the ezsession table was added. For normal user, this behaviour is only true the first time he visits the site. then the new session system only avoids one SQL SELECT query.