In this new post Greg Freeman suggests something contrary to what most PHP developers (and framework supporters) believe - your choice of PHP frameworks doesn't matter...if you're basing it on speed.

I’m talking about the speed of PHP and more specifically, evaluating frameworks and tools based on “speed”. If you have been in the PHP developer community for more than a few months, you would have seen at least a few discussions about what the fastest PHP framework is, as if this were one of the first key metrics you should evaluate first when choosing a framework for your team. You may even be contemplating switching from your current framework because you heard of a new framework that is faster. In the rest of this article, I’m going to do my best to show you why this not the best line of thinking and provide alternate and in my opinion better metrics for evaluating tools.

He talks about "frontend" versus "backend" PHP developers and how most PHP devs fit into the first category, not knowing how their applications really execute on the backend. This includes a pretty high-level concept of "speed." For his examples, he sets up a WordPress instance and fills it with some dummy content. He illustrates how, with a bit of tweaking on the "backend" side of things (server, environment, etc) the performance of the application can be greatly varied. He includes the specs for the environment he ran the tests in, some of the things he changed and a summary of the results.