All of these frameworks provide levels of abstraction, taking care of many common tasks and moving the logic away from the developer's application. Each framework offers a varying level of this "hand holding", and it's generally accepted that CakePHP leads the race in this area. By making more assumptions and relying on more default behaviours, Cake will always have a far greater overhead.

He makes some interesting observations - things like "CodeIgniter, on the other hand, is far more efficient in what it does - but doesn't do as much [as compared to CakePHP]" and "With eAccelerator, CodeIgniter was serving over ten times as many requests per second than Cake."

In response to Wil's comment regarding the PHP framework performance comparisons I made in my previous post, I have decided to post the results I got. My decision not post them initially was due to the benchmarks not being done in complete isolation (a separate client and server machine) but the scores relative to each should still be accurate and that's what I am testing for.

He used a machine with a 1.8Ghz sempron chip (running Ubuntu) to run the tests through httperf. His method involved creating the same sort of "hello world" sort of controller to gauge the framework's performance and a baseline procedural version of the same as a guide. His full results are available as a tar file and as a zip archive.