[Joeri]

Every time I'm struck by how slow the big PHP frameworks are compared to raw PHP. Either nobody cares about making those tests perform better, or something is very wrong in the architecture of those frameworks.

I expect the cause is that too much code is being loaded for every request. PHP tears down and rebuilds the world for every request, and the popular frameworks load a lot of code and instantiate a lot of objects for every request.

[aikah]

> Either nobody cares about making those tests perform better

Very few do. Just look at Symfony's complexity , the devs managed to shove proxies into the IoC container to "lazy load services" so you could inject them into the controller class constructors without actually instantiating them until you call a route handler's controller instance method... Using complex class hierarchies in PHP has a big cost, while "raw PHP" barely executes the underlying C code. To be fair people using heavy frameworks come for the battery included first, not really for the speed of the router. And since devs want more batteries, it's unlikely it will get faster.

[panopticon]

PHP frameworks generally rely on heavy amounts of caching at every level (database, bytecode, Varnish, etc) to make up for this.

Why this is the status quo is something I also question.

[makeitsuckless]

Because we know these raw tests are bullshit since it's almost trivial to set up the frameworks and the infrastructure to make it perform perfectly fine.

And because of the share-nothing architecture it scales like a mofo before we have to start jumping through hoops (and 99% of us never reach that scale).

The lack of raw speed is a minor inconvenience that's easily fixed in practice.

Also, I doubt big PHP frameworks are the only ones with a disadvantage that only shows up in these kind of benchmarks. It's like testing cars solely for straight line speed.