Paul Jones has posted the results of his benchmark on speed of different PHP Frameworks here. He has benchmarked four frameworks; CakePHP, Solar, Symfony and Zend Framework. The benchmark was fairly simple, just outputting a “Hello World” string without any bells & whistles of the frameworks involved.
The results show Solar as the fastest of the lot handling 45 requests per second with Symfony coming second at 25 requests per second. CakePHP was surprisingly slower than Symfony at 17 requests per second while the Zend Framework was the beast around at 11 requests per second. But the thing that surprised me was that Symfony beat CakePHP by a clear margin. Now unless Cake guys have bloated their framework quite a bit or Symfony folks have done away with some heavy lifting, I doubt Symfony can beat Cake on the speed front. But then I find in Paul’s post that he edited the Symfony view files to echo the “Hello World” & thus removing the HTML wrappers etc. Well, then it can hardly be called a fair benchmark when we have such doctoring around. 😀
In my opinion, if it was to be tested, it should’ve been tested with default setups instead to see which one is fast and which one comes more optimized by default. However if that was not the goal then I wouldn’t argue this point. So the only surprise was Symfony’s better performance over CakePHP, however I believe as some others that had CodeIgniter been included in this benchmark then it would’ve been interesting to see how Solar faired against this Road Runner of PHP Frameworks!! 😉 But as its known, only the ones in news are talked about, so entries for CakePHP, Symfony & Zend Framework were all but expected as they are the ones which market themselves better, Solar made it only because Paul uses it himself, so no surprise CI missed out! 😉