| awin, You'll see different responses from all different kinds of people to this. Everybody has a different allocation to the relative weights of different aspects of the system. However, I would advise you to not worry much about application performance. Focus on programmer performance instead; search through Coding Horror's blog for more info on that. Your difficulty will be reaching the point (in terms of users/loads) where you need to scale. I mean, how many users would you need before you ran too high of a load on some of the beefy Amazon EC2 instances? For almost everyone, their app will never reach that scale. Also, scaling the application layer is little more than moving sessions to a database and putting a load balancer in front of your webservers. DB stuff is a lot harder, but for basic CRUD stuff you're going to be fine for a long while. As far as performance goes, Paul Jones has a blog post (or two) on the performance of some different frameworks. I think Zend / CodeIgnitor were the two fastest, followed by symfony. CakePHP was at the end of the list, although the speed difference between top and bottom frameworks was just a factor of 2 or so. And Cake has seen about a 33% speed up in their codebase since then. In short, don't worry about scaling. Pick the framework that looks like it will make your coders more productive. |