On the Enrise blog Tim de Pater has done some benchmarking of some Zend Framework-based applications, comparing the performance of a Zend Framework 1 application to that of a Zend Framework 2 app.

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.