[nacs]

Agreed. I ran a benchmark against CodeIgniter on a test box recently and was suprised that a single query app performance went from around ~20k req/s with raw PHP (no framework) to around ~3k req/s with CI and thought that was bad for a framework. I didn't realize Wordpress performance was so much worse especially given its popularity.

Most Wordpress sites use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or Varnish-type setup if they get decent traffic though.

[Joeri]

You should check out the framework benchmarks. Raw php is competitive with other web dev platforms performance-wise, but the major php frameworks slow it down by an order of magnitude. I blame the PSR / on-demand class loading java-style architecture which was adopted by all the frameworks. They've copied a java architecture into a platform that doesn't have java's performance characteristics.

In my own benchmarks i've noticed all that class loading and instantiation slows things way down, even with an opcache. I find that a namespaced procedural / functional architecture performs much better, but no PHP framework works that way.

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

[jafaku]

CI is a badly designed and outdated framework. For real speed you should use something more professional like Symfony2.

[mtbcoder]

I won't disagree with you that CI is outdated, but it was originally created to work around the limitations of PHP4 and early versions of 5.x. Looking back in hindsight, it may seem "badly designed", but that would be taking it out of context.

Also, CI out performs Symfony in the web framework benchmarks: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/. I certainly would never equate Symfony to "real speed".

[jafaku]

You really think those guys know how to configure for production a hundred frameworks? If you base your decisions on those benchmarks, you are gonna have a bad time.

[mtbcoder]

I'm sure their benchmarks are more than adequate. In either case, if your barometer for what makes a good PHP framework is based on performance, you certainly wouldn't be choosing Symfony. If anything you'd go for for HHVM or Phalcon.

[jafaku]

That makes no sense whatsoever. Symfony2 is fast as hell. If you don't think so, you simply don't know how to properly configure it for production. There isn't much real speed you can gain from using weird things like Phalcon, unless you don't know the first thing about caching. In fact, not having all the caching mechanisms that Symfony2 gives you will probably slow down your application, even if your code is written in C.

[nacs]

You realize that those benchmarks are all open source and they encourage patches from anyone if they can demonstrate it benches better?

So instead of just saying their Symfony benchmarks are bad, submit a pull request to fix whatever you think is wrong so they can get more accurate benchmarks next time.

Also their tests are run without caching for a reason. It's not a test of the language/framework if they just use whatever language to generate a static/cached file and serve it with nginx.

[raverbashing]

Depends on the WP plugins, I suppose (and Indexes created, and MySQL tuning, etc)

[mrsaint]

And themes. It's not unusual to see themes that cause 100+ database queries. Per pageview.

[trebor]

Lots of these themes include 3 menus. And Wordpress menus are notoriously query heavy. That's why a lot of sites have caching—not because the page is large, but because the menus take so long to load.