A few days ago I read an article that compared some frameworks. Amongst others, both Zend Framework 1 and Zend Framework 2 were included. What struck me was that ZF2 was 5 times slower then ZF1. I know, it's in beta, not yet optimized for production use. But I couldn't believe the difference was so great. So I've tested it myself and want to share my results in this blog.

Included in the post are the specs for the machine he used (the host machine and the VirtualBox instances), the versions of ZF he used (1.11.1 and the latest from ZF2) and a script that uses ApacheBench to perform the testing. His testing involved benchmarking the requests per second that each application was able to perform. In all cases the ZF2 performance was slower (consistently) by a factor of about four times. The Zend Framework team are aware of the issues behind this (something involving the DIC) and already have plans to work on it in the future.

And he's completely right [about it being premature to report benchmarks on a pre-stable release]. This benchmark was meant purely to see if the article from piprime.fr made any sense. And it's a starting point for me to see what you can do with the different optimizations and what their performance impact is.

On Zend Framework lists there was a topic raised about performance impact of Zend_Loader component, which is used for - no surprise here! - loading classes, including autoloading, etc. Some folks thought that since Zend_Loader is executing some code before actual loading the required file, it must cost something. And it makes sense. However, how much does it cost?

He uses a set of scripts he developed to compare the bytecode caches of the requests both with and without the caching turned on. He ran the tests on a PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 installs with the lower (better) numbers coming from the latter in requests per second. He highly recommends turning this caching on on your system if you haven't already.