I've been looking at symfonfy2 to see if our team wanted to switch from codeignitor for future PHP gigs we get. Any idea why it is such a dog in the benchmarks?
Generic benchmarks are dumb. They stress just a few points of the system, you can't assert that the test case was well written, you are not sure that caching on the framework was enabled, or even configured, there's a lot of variables involved to assure that you are extracting the most in performance from a framework/language that you just don't know on those generic benchmarks.
If you want to compare performance, do it yourself, don't believe someone else's benchmarks. Write a test case that is suitable for your reality, then go for a conclusion.
The techempower benchmarks are open source. If you think it is badly written, send a pull request. Running your own benchmarks simply isn't feasible at the scale they're running them. We all benefit from a comprehensive and well executed benchmark suite.
Symfony2 is a very slow framework by comparison but it's also a very complete framework (if you like to have it all). Why it's slow in the benchmarks, I can't really answer but I know that the development enviroment in Symfony2 is very slow and I haven't met one developer who at hates Symfony2 on at least one level.
One framework for PHP developers that is worth looking into is Laravel. Very clean and reasonable framework. Have a look at it here: http://laravel.com/
Laravel has an amazing amount of noise (hype?) around it which Symfony2 doesn't (why?), but looking through the code and documentation it doesn't seem to hit my pain points or be... complete.
For example, it has ActiveRecord by default, so you're focued around data stores... ideal for CRUD, but then its libraries to generate and validate forms are like something from 2008.
I'm a bit bemused as I must be missing something, given its popularity. Perhaps the apps I build are not a good fit for it - I'd be keen to have your input.
The sparkline in the bottom status bar lets you keep an eye on server request performance (single page app), and clicking it allows to see the details of the past 100 requests, including what DB calls were made and what parameters were used (great for finding slow queries and pulling them out to test and tune in isolation). The server tab gives overall php server and database statistics.
Our product has gotten a lot faster since integrating this, and I don't think that's a coincidence. It is extremely useful, and not just for performance optimization.
