The Symfony Finland has shared some benchmarks of the latest versions of the Symfony framework (simple applications) on three current environments to see the differences: PHP 5.6, HHVM 3.11 and PHP 7.0.1.

Since the first functional versions of PHP 7.0.0 were made available, there have been a number of benchmarks comparing PHP 5.6, HHVM and PHP 7. [...] The recently released eZ Platform is a CMS built on the Symfony framework. It's a good representation of a modern PHP application with complex functionalities and no legacy code from the 2000's. Thus making a good candidate benchmarks for testing an application built with the Symfony Framework (version 2.7.8).

So let's see how an application built with the Symfony2 framework fares on PHP 5.6, HHVM 3.11 and PHP 7.0.1.

He starts by describing the test setup including the default installation of the eZ platform and how it was configured/set up. He then shares the results, showing memory usage and response times for each of the three different platforms. There's even results from different parts of the application: the front page and the "Top Stories" and "Projects" pages. The results also include the findings for the number of requests per second both with and without the Symfony Proxy included in the platform.

In this recent post to the /r/php subreddit on Reddit.com, AfterNite wonders why it's important to measure the "requests per second" that a framework handles (or if it is at all).

I have been using Laravel 4 for a while now. Recently I saw a benchmark here (http://blog.a-way-out.net/blog/2015/03/27/php-framework-benchmark/). There are many frameworks that were compared and compared to phalcon the requests per second seem crappy. Hearing that zend is powerful and primarily aimed at businesses how is it that a few hundred requests per second is good? I can't wrap my head around why people are using frameworks such as Zend, Laravel 5 and Symfony.

The comments on the post mention things like:

• taking benchmarks "with a grain of salt"
• How it relates to optimization
• Wondering what the mean requests-per-second would be
• What effect a datasource has on performance
• The relation between performance and ease of use

You can read the full post or leave an opinion of your own on the full post.

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.

On the PHP 10.0 blog, Stas does a little benchmarking of a big part of each request to a Zend Framework application - the Loader.

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.