Benchmarking Phalcon

It has been quite a while since we run our benchmarks against other networks. Actually the last time we had the benchmarks in our documentation was for Phalcon 1.3! Yes we know, we have been neglecting this.

Hopefully this post will offer some perspective on what you can expect from Phalcon and your application. It goes without saying that every application needs the best design for its needs, but using Phalcon can also push your application’s performance even further.

Methodology

We have installed the stock application for each framework. We have ensured that there is one route, one controller and one view that will allow us to display Hello World on the screen. Naturally, this is not a real life example, but it demonstrates the minimum resources needed to display a simple string on the screen.

Note: These are the stock applications that each framework offers. The only thing that we changed is to put each framework in `Production` mode.

This benchmark only measures the time it takes for each framework to start, run each action, present the result needed and free up the resources at the end of the request. Any PHP application based on the said framework will need this time and resources. It is safe to assume that any implementations that will be much more complex than this one will require additional resources per request.

The ab benchmarking tool from Apache was used for these tests. 1,000 requests using 5 concurrent connections for each framework.

Results

We will start with the results of our benchmark. The hardware used, raw data as well as setup/configuration changes we did for each framework are further down in this post.

Included Files

We have used the get_included_files() function to figure out how many files have been included for one request. The call to the function was at the end of the entry point, usually index.php (lower is better).

Memory used (KB)

We have used the memory_get_usage() function to figure out how many much memory was used for each request. The call to this function was at the end of the entry point, usually index.php. (lower is better).

Requests per Second (mean)

Using the ab tool, we measured the requests per second that each framework could handle. (higher is better).

Time to complete 1,000 requests

Again using the ab tool, we measured the time it took to complete 1,000 requests. (lower is better).

Conclusion

Phalcon is clearly outperforming any other framework in this test.

Again we will stress out that these are just the stock applications that come with each framework. The results will definitely vary based on your installation. For instance a developer could remove services from a particular framework which will speed it up (at least the included files) but could also add more services which would slow it down.

Nothing beats a good design or better yet, the best design for the application needs. However, if you can gain some performance and lower your memory consumption by just using Phalcon, it is worth a look and a try if you haven’t done so already .

If any of our readers have suggestions that we could implement to make this benchmark as realistic as possible, feel free to issue a pull request with your suggestions.

The last benchmark that one can find is from TechEmpower which was conducted on November 16, 2016. According to their test schedule, we should have seen round 14 in February this year but that has not happened yet.

<3 Phalcon Team

Appendix

Github Repo

Framework Benchmarks

Hardware

I set up a virtual machine with Ubuntu Server 16.10. We stopped the X server and allocated 4GB of RAM and 50GB of hard drive space.

After the system was updated to the latest packages, Apache was installed on the virtual machine. For PHP and Phalcon we chose to use PHP 7.1 using the PPA from Ondřej Surý.

PHP

Version

PHP 7.1.3-3+deb.sury.org~yakkety+1 (cli) (built: Mar 25 2017 14:01:32) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2017 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.1.3-3+deb.sury.org~yakkety+1, Copyright (c) 1999-2017, by Zend Technologies

Modules

OPCache was enabled and the installation was the default one without any modifications in php.ini. The modules installed were:

calendar, Core, ctype, curl, date, dom, exif, fileinfo, filter, ftp, gettext, hash, iconv, intl, json, libxml, mbstring, mcrypt, openssl, pcntl, pcre, PDO, phalcon, Phar, posix, readline, Reflection, session, shmop, SimpleXML, sockets , SPL, standard, sysvmsg, sysvsem, sysvshm, tokenizer, wddx, xml, xmlreader, xmlwriter, xsl, Zend OPcache, zlib

Frameworks

The frameworks compared were:

Installation and Changes

We tried to make this test as realistic as possible, ensuring that all frameworks behave in production mode. However, nobody is perfect so any suggestions that the community can provide to tweak each framework to its maximum potential, feel free to issue a pull request in our Github repository.

FuelPHP

curl https://get.fuelphp.com/oil | sh
oil create fuelphp

fuelphp/fuel/app/bootstrap.php

\Fuel::$env = \Arr::get($_SERVER, 'FUEL_ENV', \Arr::get($_ENV, 'FUEL_ENV', \Fuel::PRODUCTION));
// \Fuel::$env = \Arr::get($_SERVER, 'FUEL_ENV', \Arr::get($_ENV, 'FUEL_ENV', \Fuel::DEVELOPMENT));

fuelphp/fuel/app/views/welcome/index.php

Hello World!

Kohana

wget https://github.com/kohana/kohana/releases/download/v3.3.6/kohana-v3.3.6.zip
unzip kohana-v3.3.6.zip

kohana/application/bootstrap.php

if (isset($_SERVER['KOHANA_ENV']))
{
    Kohana::$environment = constant('Kohana::'.strtoupper($_SERVER['KOHANA_ENV']));
}
Kohana::$environment = Kohana::PRODUCTION;

kohana/application/classes/Controller/Welcome.php

<?php defined('SYSPATH') or die('No direct script access.');

class Controller_Welcome extends Controller_Template {
        public $template = 'welcome';
        public function action_index()
        {
                $this->template->message = 'Hello, World!';
        }

} // End Welcome

kohana/application/views/welcome.php

<?php echo $message; ?>

Laravel

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel laravel

laravel/.env

APP_DEBUG=false

laravel/config/app.php

    ...
    'env' => env('APP_ENV', 'production'),
    'debug' => env('APP_DEBUG', false),
    ...

laravel/resources/views/welcome.blade.php

Hello World!

Nette

composer create-project nette/web-project nette
cd nette
chmod -R a+rw temp log

nette/app/presenters/templates/Homepage/default.latte

Hello World!

Phalcon

Downloaded sample from the MVC repository.

phalcon/app/views/index.phtml

Hello World!

Symfony

composer create-project symfony/framework-standard-edition symfony

symfony/app/Resources/views/base.html.twig

Hello World

Yii

composer global require "fxp/composer-asset-plugin:^1.2.0"
composer create-project --prefer-dist yiisoft/yii2-app-basic yii

yii/web/index.php

<?php

// comment out the following two lines when deployed to production
//defined('YII_DEBUG') or define('YII_DEBUG', true);
//defined('YII_ENV') or define('YII_ENV', 'dev');

yii/config/web.php

/**
if (YII_ENV_DEV) {
    // configuration adjustments for 'dev' environment
    $config['bootstrap'][] = 'debug';
    $config['modules']['debug'] = [
        'class' => 'yii\debug\Module',
        // uncomment the following to add your IP if you are not connecting from localhost.
        //'allowedIPs' => ['127.0.0.1', '::1'],
    ];

    $config['bootstrap'][] = 'gii';
    $config['modules']['gii'] = [
        'class' => 'yii\gii\Module',
        // uncomment the following to add your IP if you are not connecting from localhost.
        //'allowedIPs' => ['127.0.0.1', '::1'],
    ];
}
*/
return $config;

yii/views/site/index.php

Hello World!

yii/views/layouts/main.php

<?= $content ?>

Zend Framework

composer create-project zendframework/skeleton-application zf

zf/public/index.php

// Retrieve configuration
$appConfig = require __DIR__ . '/../config/application.config.php';
//if (file_exists(__DIR__ . '/../config/development.config.php')) {
//    $appConfig = ArrayUtils::merge($appConfig, require __DIR__ . '/../config/development.config.php'); 
//}

zf/module/Application/view/layout/layout.phtml

<?= $this->content ?>

`ab` results