php - Using Zend Framework for highload projects

Question

Zend Framework is a good framework but not very fast. Can you tell whether it's worth using Zend Framework for highload projects, for example, for email marketing service that can inlude about ten or houndred thousand of users? Is it possible to achive acceptable performance using Zend Framework? Has anybody such an expirience? Thank you very much.

Answer 1

For what I have seen, the definitive defense of Zend Framework performance and recommendations for performance optimization comes from Padraic Brady at:

PHP Framework Benchmarks: Entertaining But Ultimately Useless

In particular, note his four recommendations for performance optimization:

1. Don't use Zend_Application. While Zend_App is great for creating consistent complex bootstraps within a standardised structure, it doesn't come without a significant performance hit to baseline performance. A more direct bootstrap (typical of ZF until Zend_App arrived) is far faster and can also be done without configuration files.

2. Skip using the ViewRenderer plugin. Without the ViewRenderer, you need to manually configure Zend_View and add render() calls to Controllers. This is actually very simple to do and is fairly fast - fast was never really part of the ViewRenderer's genetics.

3. Use autoloading. Strip require_once calls from the framework library so unneeded files are ignored. Replace uses of Zend_Loader_Autoloader with a not-so-crazy autoloader function. In fact, pray Zend_Loader is never used - it does a lot of file ops that, to date, have never been explained to me as having any value.

4. Preload everything (Symfony 2 Preview does!). It buys you some performance cookies and equalises the speed baseline. Using a simple preload script is not that hard.