MAY 9

Performance benchmark: Cake vs. CodeIgniter vs. Kohana

Tags: codeigniter, frameworks, kohana, php

The setup

This benchmark measures ‘out of the box’ performance of the above 3 frameworks. Framework versions are as follows: Cake 1.2.0.6311-beta, CodeIgniter 1.6.1, Kohana 2.1.1 (latest stable releases available at the time of testing). For this test I used a small static ‘hello world’ page, no dynamic elements other than framework internals. I chose not to use frameworks’ built in caching engines, since using them may actually be more expensive (than not using them) for caching static pages. Each benchmark was run 3 times, with the following parameters: concurrency level 5, number of requests 1000 (ab -c 5 -n 1000); the mean of those benchmarks was then derived. Here are the environment specs:

Linux Mint 4.0 (Ubuntu 7.10)
Apache 2.2.4
PHP 5.2.3
eAccelerator 0.9.5.2

The results

Static HTML file served by Apache resulted in 13528 RPS and 11397 RPS with eAccelerator enabled. Finally, here are the benchmarks:
Performance benchmark: Cake vs. CodeIgniter vs. Kohana

Conclusion

Cake has so many nice features, too bad it’s so incredibly slow - even with eAccelerator enabled, it’s about 30% slower than a plain CI/Kohana installation. Unacceptable. CodeIgniter and Kohana, on the other hand, show great results and come up just about even (330 RPS, 326 RPS respectively) without eAccelerator. With eAccelerator turned on, CodeIgniter is clearly the winner. My wild guess is that eAccelerator does not play so nice with __autoload function, which is widely used in Kohana.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under codeigniter, frameworks, kohana, php. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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9 Responses to “Performance benchmark: Cake vs. CodeIgniter vs. Kohana”

May 9th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Jonathon Hill says:

Thanks for the benchmark - very interesting. But the benchmark image is not showing up. Could you check into that?

Thanks!
Jonathon
May 9th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Alex says:

Ooops - that was a silly mistake - should be ok now :)
May 9th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Louis W says:

Interesting findings. Thanks for posting this.
June 14th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Learning Kohana » From the forums and the web says:

[…] covered benchmarks before and here is another one. The conclusion that eAccelerator isn’t too keen on php5’s auto loader functions is […]
June 17th, 2008 at 2:06 am
Nathanael M says:

Thanks so much for doing this. This has been a question among my circles for a long time. Cheers.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Tido says:

You should do these benchmarks with Kohana’s new path caching. It makes for a huge improvement when using apps like APC and eAccelerator.
August 29th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Alex says:

Ok, I’ll download the latest versions of CI and Cake as well and give them a test run.
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:49 pm
pr0digy.com » Benchmark update: Cake vs. CodeIgniter vs. Kohana says:

[…] like the previous benchmark this one measures out of the box performance of the above 3 frameworks. I ran each benchmark 3 […]
April 8th, 2010 at 4:14 am
Sheldmandu says:

I did some comprehensive performance benchmarks of all the latest PHP MVC Frameworks including Yii 1.1.1, Kohana 2.3.4 and Code Igniter 1.7.2 as well as others. The results and analysis of results is here: Comparing PHP MVC Framework Performance