PHP framework comparison benchmarks | Hacker News Reader

PHP framework comparison benchmarks

avnetlabs.com

26 pointsedw51924 comments

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.

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.

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.

Speed can be easily benchmarked. Security can't.

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.

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.

+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)

Also fully PHP5 :)

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.

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.

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.)

Impressive resume on Symfony. I think Symfony powers all of Delicious http://www.symfony-project.org/blog/2007/10/02/delicious-pre...

I worked at Yahoo! "out of the box" Symfony does NOT power any of the above; their own "ySymfony" fork does.

Hmm how is your barebonesmvc framework different from this? http://tiago.zusee.com/code/nicedog/

oh i see, they're both tiny, so they must be the same. Are you retarded?

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))

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

And it is seemingly getting slower. Lots of complaints about speed with the latest 1.2 release.

CakePHP 1.2.0.7125 rc1 was used in the test, that's pretty current (rc2 is the latest). Having no problems with speed doesn't mean it's slow--you just might have pushed it beyond the three requests per second that it can handle.

My latest project was based on 1.1, which is actually a stable version. And it does handle more than three requests per second ;)

But I have some doubts about cake 1.2 now. I believe we should wait for stable 1.2 release...

What? No Qcodo?? http://qcodo.com

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