Learning Kohana

Fred Wu over at thislab.com has done some simple benchmarks comparing Kohana with CodeIgniter. In general, Kohana is a little slower in speed and uses more memory.

I’m reluctant to draw conclusions based on the numbers he presents. Wu himself says to take it with a little salt Anyway, I don’t know the exact setup of the test. Also testing a framework by using the word limiter on paragraphs 20,000 times might not be the best way. I rarely use the word limiter in this fashion

Another thing is that the profilers of CI and Kohana were used to measure the results. Afaik there are some differences as to where in CI and Kohana the numbers are measured.

Anyway, there are issues for these kinds of benchmarks in general, basically coming down to the point where you have to build your application twice, one for each framework, and then run the benchmarks on it. If you’re about to do this, let me warn you, it’s cheaper to just buy more/better hardware instead of coding your application twice, and just settle with the framework that suits you best. My conclusion in these kinds of discussions is always that you should use the tools that are fit for you.

Fred Wu also compared CI/K2 to CakePHP and those numbers did strike me because of the more than significant difference.

Results the higher the better (requests per second).

CI 1.6.1: 122.18 [#/sec]
K SVN: 113.96 [#/sec]
K 2.1.1: 118.54 [#/sec]

As a comparison (just for fun), here are two results for CakePHP:

First run: 18.66 [#/sec]
Second run: 33.47 [#/sec]

Again, Cake does a whole lot things more than CI and Kohana i.e. a lot more magic is going on. If that’s your thing CakePHP is your best candidate. If not, try out CI or Kohana and find out which one suits you best.