Submitted by Pierre Jean Duvivier on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 15:22
I am the head of the swiss edipresse's webfactory. You can see my professional bio in Linkedin. I produce and launch website for this company. I work with 10 colleagues under my command : designer, developers and project manager.
18 months ago we were running eZpublish on 4 of our website. 3 websites are big ones : Le Matin (http://www.lematin.ch), La tribune de genève (http://www.tdg.ch) and big local newspaper in the swiss french part : 24 heures (24 hours) (http://www.24heures.ch). The latest website was Femina (http://www.femina.ch) a women's magazine well known in Switzerland.
We were facing big performances problems with EzPublish and we decided to migrate to Drupal.
This story is the final comparaison between the both CMS after this 18 month of CMS's experiences.
The result is clear for us : eZpublish have big structural applicative problem wich can not be solved for big media website with an high level of content's refresh.
It's better to not use eZpublish for media website instead to spend a lof of money beleiving that the problems will end.
EzPublish infrastructure
With eZpublish, we used to produce 500.000 pages views / day :
2 reverse proxy server (Squid)
4 front servers
4 database servers
1 batch server
11 servers....to maintain 4 websites with 500.000 pages views.
We were paying 10 developers to work on this 4 website with 500.000 pages views a day and we had between 5 seconds and 15 seconds to load a simple page.
Drupal infrastructure/
With Drupal, we use to produce now 1.000.000 pages views / day :
no reverse proxy server
7 front servers
2 databases servers
"only" 9 servers with only 1 developer to work on the maintenance part for the same 4 website with exactly the same functionnalities
We manage 1.000.000 pages views a day with them and have between 1 second and 5 seconds to load a page now.
For us Drupal is more efficient than EZpublish. The cost to produce and maintain eZpublish's website for 500.000 pages/day was 10 times higher than the cost for Drupal to work with 1.000.000 pages/day. A page produced by eZpublish cost 20 times more than a page produced by Drupal for a quality level higher with Drupal.
If we had the entire night correcting bugs in eZpublish compare with "the cool night" where nothing happens with Drupal..the final result is without any problem a clear victory of Drupal after 18 months.
I think both CMS are good choices for setting up a commercial website. But I decided to use Drupal for one of my sites, and Wordpress for another. I like Drupal better, although I also want to try eZpublish, maybe on a new site I'll be working on.
My Personal Blog
I have said this to allot of people. Duprals Algorithm is smoother than the competition. But I didn't have numbers. Thanks for sharing...
satellite direct
drupal is the best cms ever made
bukmacher
Thank you so much for informative sharing.
It's good to hear comments from people who have actually used both pieces of software extensivley.
There are not enough blogs like this of people who really use the stuff.
As to the commenter who slated your whole tech team, I suggest he gets his/her nose out from ezPublish's butt.
Your story (which you are somewhat desperately spreading over the web - why?) sounds like some cowboys tried to ride a jumper. What you needed instead was a farm horse. Now you got it. Lucky you.
It's not the fault of either of the two systems that your CMS evaluation did not reveal the main point. Your technical team was not able to handle eZ, and never will, with the kind of attitude you show here.
Thanks a lot for your comment!
Having had a little problem with Cezpdf, I hit upon eZpublish via Google and spent a couple of hours trying to find out about the value behind all this hype (am using CodeIgniter, by the way).
What bugs me is that they stole the code from Wayne Munro (who put Cezpdf into the public domain) and adopted it for their purposes without even mentioning him. I think this is very bad style and will definitely produce bad karma.
Apart from that: I downloaded the whole stuff and had a quick look; it seems to be another one of those huge machines nobody can (and should) have an idea about how it works (somebody said: steep learning curve; like Zend, for example, or Java for that matter).
Comments like yours are what the web needs. Real experiences, real world systems, concrete numbers. Thanks again!
Did you implement the same backend features in your Drupal back office ?
Did you implement the same frontend features in your Drupal public site ?
So when it comes to comparing potatoes with tomatoes then of course potatoes have a big structrual problem since they are neither round, nor red, and of course not juicy at all.
Definitely not like tomatoes.
Blaming any product for human mistakes is a pretty common behaviour, but does not solve anything at all actually.
I compare what an private company "gain" or not using Drupal Vs eZpublish.
Functionnalities was the same and now better with Drupal. Before all people was sad with EzPublish solution, now people visit us to see how we succeed to build more profitable website with a good technical solution.
It's only $$$ figure. It's our experience. I am not telling that there is no existing company happy with EzPublish. I only put my experience here.
After on my technical point of view, the data model of EzPublish have big failure wich could explain the performance problem. SQL queries of 500 Mb is not a good SQL queries. EzPublish was producing this kind of thing. Cluster solution with two "poor table" where all is saved inside (binary files divided in small packet for example) is a very bad solution to do load balancing. I am not inventing that.
All tech people we took to recover from the disaster with EzPublish had the same technical view of me...My company loose a lof of money and a lof of time with EzPublish : it's a fact.
Suppliers we took was wrong and did a very bad job : it's also true but they was not working on the good technical solution too.
When you add a bad technical solution and bad suppliers, it's true that you can not succeed.
Sounds like you definitely had the wrong suppliers, poor training or a bad internal development team.
We run individual sites on less hardware with higher page views on eZ Publish with 1-3 second page loads and no reverse proxies.
There is no doubt Drupal is a lighter solution, both technically as well as at an operating and business level, and perhaps thats all your company needed, but in terms of suggesting eZ doesn't suit large media businesses solely on your own poor experience seems misguided.
hum what are this big daily newspaper website with more than 200'000 unique visitor a day using EZpublish with no reverse proxy ?
The only experience i know with big media website with Ezpublish are using pre-produced static cache with reverse proxy on.....
Could you give us the name and the url of this website ?
Dear Mr. Duvivier,
I have heard rumors that the websites you mentioned (24heures.ch, lematin.ch etc.) are actually planning to re-migrate to ezPublish. Is that true to any degree and if so what would be the reasons for this change of mind? These rumors come from a somewhat unreliable and biased source so I tend to not believing them. Could you please clarify that because one of our customers is having problems with ezPublish much like those you described and it would be really insightful to know if the mentioned websites are still happy with Drupal. Thank you very much and have a nice evening.
best regards,
André Runzer
It's false...
We continue to develop media website with Drupal now and we still consider EZpublish as a bad media solution for our website.