In response to these stats that the Avent Labs blog published on PHP framework benchmarks, Akash Mehta has made a few of his own observations about the numbers they presented.

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."