Comparing Performance of Plain PHP and Four of Its Popular Frameworks

Abstract: The objective of this study is to evaluate performance of four popular PHP frameworks Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter and Phalcon together with the plain PHP. The decision of making this study was based on the fact that there is a lack of comparison tests between the most popular PHP frameworks. Visiting the official websites of these frameworks, the first thing to notice is the slogans that have been made by the core teams. The majority of these slogans contain quality attributes like speed and high performance. As a developer looking for performance in your next project, choosing the right PHP framework by these slogans is not that easy. Therefor, the performance of these frameworks is put to the test. And to do that, three experiments are conducted in which five functionally equivalent PHP applications are developed and used as targets. One version of these applications represents the plain PHP and the other four represent the four mentioned frameworks. The experiments are conducted in two sessions. The first session deals with the execution time and the stack trace measurements while the second one is covering the measurement of the memory usage consumption. The result outcome of these experiments has been analyzed and interpreted in order to expose the performance of the targeted frameworks. The experiment results prove that the targeted frameworks perform differently compared with each other and the PHP stack. Plain PHP and Phalcon are performing well while the other three frameworks have both mediocre and low performance.