

PHP framework comparison benchmarks - edw519
http://www.avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchmarks

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ojbyrne
Second last sentence: "I do admit that considering my experience with
CodeIgniter, I might have inadvertently set it up optimally without doing the
same to the other two frameworks." I felt a little cheated reading that at the
very end of the piece, might be better to put it near the beginning.

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thorax
I have to say I've become a huge Code Igniter fan over the past year. I didn't
use to think much of PHP (I prefer Python), but CI really makes it feel a bit
like a real language and they have the best user guide documentation that I've
seen for a framework.

If you have to use PHP, I do recommend trying CI-- we've had good experiences
with the performance, but that's really not why we toyed with it.
Django/Python has been good to us, too, but I was shocked to find that a PHP
framework could work out so nicely.

~~~
jamongkad
Seconded on CI but what I'm surprised about is that there are so many of these
speed benchmarks amongst frameworks and what not. But no definite benchmarks
on security. Which is a concern of mine in any web project that invovles PHP.

~~~
agotterer
Security is only part of the frameworks job. It should definitely follow best
practices and have functions to deal with security concerns. But its really
the job of the programmer to make sure his/her code is secure. And I don't
just mean sanitizing data. For example it's not the frameworks responsibility
to make sure you don't put a sequential session ID in a cookie that could
easily be hijacked.

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neovive
It would be interesting to see the Kohana framework (<http://kohanaphp.com>)
compared, since it was originally a fork of CI, but includes a true ORM
library.

~~~
markbao
+1 for Kohana. Their ORM is superb, and overall the speed of the framework is
better than CodeIgniter. Also is developed by a community (as opposed to
Ellislab)

~~~
neovive
Also fully PHP5 :)

~~~
jamongkad
I love Kohana's ORM lib. Another framework I've been impressed with is Akelos.
It sports a very progressive tag library remiscient of RoR.

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jemptymethod
They missed my own framework at <http://code.google.com/p/barebonesmvc-php/>

Pretty damn close to straight PHP I'm guessing. Am using for the webUI on an
embedded device, manufactured by one fortune 100, for another.

In prior gig for a startup last Aug-Nov, they used Symfony and lost projects
for 2 of the most heavily visited websites in the world. Home page took 10s if
not 100s of thousands of function calls to render, I know cause I profiled
them with XDebug after the fact. They laid off 1/3 of their workforce last
week.

~~~
bb_mn
Could you elaborate on this? It sounds a bit far-fetched that Symfony (a PHP
framework) would solely be responsible for losing a company 2 huge contracts
and laying off 1/3 of their workforce. 10s of thousands of function calls for
a home page? What did the home page do?

I personally have been very impressed by Symfony (version 1.1 was just
released this week so it sounds like your experience was with version 1.0 or a
beta version), the Symfony community, the IRC channel and the documentation (a
full print version book which is really well-written with all of the contents
available online for free as well). In the few benchmarks I've seen that
actually bothered to include Symfony, it seems to measure up quite well.

Symfony powers Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Answers and at least some portion of
Delicious, by the way.

(Sorry to jump in with a first post questioning what you've said, but I would
like to understand better what your experience was in order to be aware of
potential pitfalls that may be lurking around the bend for me.)

~~~
jamongkad
Impressive resume on Symfony. I think Symfony powers all of Delicious
[http://www.symfony-project.org/blog/2007/10/02/delicious-
pre...](http://www.symfony-project.org/blog/2007/10/02/delicious-preview-
built-with-symfony)

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asnyder
I find this to be strongly lacking in completeness. There are many different
PHP frameworks, libraries, etc. The author decided to compare only 3.
Comparing only 3 of anything in a field that is easily 10 times that is
somewhat useless, and seems somewhat bias.

That said, I feel it necessary to put together an actual comprehensive test of
all the leading frameworks and libraries across platforms. Let me get my WAPT
fired up. I'll post the results sometime this month.

(disclaimer: I'm affiliated with NOLOH (<http://www.noloh.com>))

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noodle
CI is very barebones and minimalistic by default, which is what causes the
nice benchmarking results. but it also means you might need to do some extra
overhead work to get that little bit of functionality you need, or import the
right library, as most things are turned off by default.

i'm a long time CI user and i like it more than cake/zend.

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es
I can't believe CakePHP is so slow. Probably they have used unstable version.
I used cake in few projects and had no problems with speed.

~~~
ComputerGuru
CakePHP _is_ slow, sorry.

Speaking from experience here, having rewritten WordPress from scratch and
tried a number of frameworks before just biting the bullet and writing my own.

PerformancePress: [http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/wordpress-performancepress-
and...](http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/wordpress-performancepress-and-
gsoc-2008/)

However, speed in web-scripting languages isn't the kind of thing you notice
until it starts to give you trouble. Projects get started and finished, tested
and deployed, and only after the real traffic starts coming in that the
dismaying results turn up.... so while CakePHP may not feel slow, that doesn't
mean it isn't so.

~~~
edb
I think this is an unfair blanket statement. I think that every APPLICATION,
forget framework-dependent or not, will have its bottlenecks.

I see so many size comparisons about which framework is faster than the
other... People need to realize that a framework is nothing more than an
application library. A smart developper will know how to use it to his/her
advantage and will know how to identify bottlenecks and optimize them.

The point is to get your ideas into the wild fast. All you need for that is a
development environment YOU'RE comfortable in, be it RoR, CakePHP, Code
Igniter, Zend, whatever..

Once your idea is in the wild and generating traffic that breaks all your best
optimization tricks, I'd hope that you have enough revenue or interest
generated to then start rethinking the framework that it was built upon.

I think if you're rewriting frameworks and tools like wordpress from the get-
go, you're missing the point.

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goodkarma
What? No Qcodo?? <http://qcodo.com>

