[danielparks]

Sure, I was considering cheap optimizations — APC is helpful, but not that helpful.

Most queries in most projects are cheap.

On the other hand, frameworks that have ORMs and other DB abstraction layers often make trade a little bit of DB time (and developer time) for a lot of framework time.

And as you say, scaling the DB is a lot harder than scaling the app servers (typically) — the implication being that trading framework performance for developer time makes a lot of sense.

[lsh123]

Well, all applications are different so can't comment on your experience. For me APC does at least 2-3x in the max number of non-DB requests per second. Personally I think it is a lot.

As with any technology, ORM is just a tool. Used wisely it works great. Used it w/o understanding of what you are doing - you get a recipe for disaster.

"Most queries in most projects are cheap" is the true assumption for small projects. When you cross certain threshold, none of the non-cached queries are cheap (by non-caching I mean caching in all layers including the DB itself).

And I strongly disagree with "trading framework performance for developer time makes a lot of sense". In 99% of cases you DON'T care about performance. Yet, a "bad" framework adds penalty in 100% of cases. I strongly prefer to have a good-enough performance from the framework and then focus on this 1% of cases when it matters (and in majority of cases, it's the DB, not the app code).