Benchmarks: PHP Frameworks Compared

How fast are top 3 most popular PHP frameworks (Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter) when compared to Lucinda? To measure this, a series of ApacheBench stress tests weighting basic MVC performance was conducted on all my machines using an open methodology.

Benchmark Methodology

The main point was to make all benchmarks fair. Each framework was installed as a separate project using default factory settings on same machine, same web server using similar virtual host settings (if possible). Another point was to make all benchmarks independently reproductible. Developers are encouraged to reproduce benchmarks on their own machine by following methodology page!

Subject of testing is MVC performance of each framework (their kernels: routing, controlling, templating) on following simple scenarios:

a /test/html route handled by controller that sends variable test with value me to a templated HTML view test rendered as:
Test: me
a /test/json route handled by controller that sends variable test with value me to a JSON rendered as:
{"status":"ok","body":{"test":"me"}}

Each framework was installed as a separate project, bound to a local domain named by FRAMEWORK itself (eg: laravel project => www.laravel.local), then configured to do above tasks. Once done, each configuration was benchmarked using following commands:

ab -n 100000 -c10 http://www.FRAMEWORK.local/test/html ab -n 100000 -c10 http://www.FRAMEWORK.local/test/json

Configuration of machine results below were obtained on:

CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-8565U CPU @ 1.80GHz × 8
RAM: 8157 MB
Operating System: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
PHP Version: PHP 7.4.3
Web Server: Apache/2.4.41
Hard Disk: Samsung SSD 860 EVO M.2 250GB

Benchmark Results

Following raw results were obtained by ApacheBench commands above:

Format	Lucinda Framework 3.2.0	Symfony Framework 5.2.99	CodeIgniter Framework 4.1.1	Laravel Framework 8.5.16
html	view result	view result	view result	view result
json	view result	view result	view result	view result

They show Lucinda to be incomparably faster than all others (thanks to its efficient design) by any metric:

requests per second: how many requests were answered within 1 second (click on picture below for details):
average response time by percentile: how many milliseconds it took to answer request for a % sample (click on picture below for details):

To see detailed breakdown for each framework tested (other than Lucinda), check these pages:

Requests per Second

The most common metric, used by other benchmarks as well, is based on requests-per-second: measuring average number of requests framework can answer in 1 second. Results based on raw data collected above:

Rendering	Lucinda Framework 3.2.0	Symfony Framework 5.2.99	CodeIgniter Framework 4.1.1	Laravel Framework 8.5.16
HTML	12510.76	3175.6	1419.98	346.78
JSON	13830.21	3499.42	1389.03	153.22

This means that Lucinda is over 3.9 times faster than Symfony, 8.8 times faster than CodeIgniter and 36.1 times faster than Laravel in rendering templated HTML.

Response Time (ms) by Percentile

For those unfamiliar with ApacheBench tests, it measures time response was received by percentile of requests. Results based on raw data collected above:

%	Lucinda Framework 3.2.0	Symfony Framework 5.2.99	CodeIgniter Framework 4.1.1	Laravel Framework 8.5.16
HTML RENDERING BENCHMARK (ms)
50	1	3	6	11
66	1	3	6	14
75	1	4	7	17
80	1	4	9	19
90	1	5	11	22
95	1	5	12	29
98	1	7	16	47
99	1	8	17	768
100	13	26	44	1986
JSON RENDERING BENCHMARK (ms)
50	1	2	6	11
66	1	3	6	13
75	1	3	7	16
80	1	4	9	19
90	1	4	11	22
95	1	5	13	30
98	1	6	17	1337
99	1	7	18	2547
100	19	23	54	3973

This means, for example, that Lucinda is over 7 times more efficient than Symfony, 16 times more efficient than CodeIgniter and 47 times more efficient than Laravel in answering 98% of templated HTML requests.

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