Zend Framework is always considered as being the slow/bloated one. I don't think this is right, so I decided to prove that it's not correct and in fact ZF is as good as other frameworks are. This post doesn't cover any benchmarks though; this is more like a architecture review and some misconceptions disproof.

He counters the following with a bit of logic that makes the points a bit more shaky than they first seem:

• Large installation footprint
• Unnecessary features
• Use more system resources

If you're still not convinced, he offers two other tips to help streamline your Zend Framework install - profiling to find the bottlenecks and using Zend_Application sparingly as it can be a bit of a resource problem.

We needed to locate where most of the memory is allocated in our scripts (as some of them became too memory hungry), so I've created memtrack extension. This extension helps us to see unusually big memory allocations in production code.

The extension logs memory usage information out to the standard error log file (however that'd defined on your system) and comes with a few configuration options. These let you control things like a "soft limit" at which to report the usage problems, the ability to ignore certain functions that you might know will cause a high load and and "vm_limit" setting that can help if your script is leaking memory at the end of its run.

Choosing a framework to implement your web app is a trade off like any other design decision. Let's focus in on specifics and talk about what the trade off is that you make when you choose a framework. Specifically, I'm talking about MVC frameworks in PHP.

She looks at both sides mentioning the good (code organization, encourages secure coding) and the bad (MVC is defined differently by different people, "More Than One Way to Do It", code bloat). In the end, her recommendation is to look at what you're trying to accomplish and decide first if a framework is for you and your app and, of it is, select the right one for the job.