In a quick post Jani Hartikainen take a look at some optimization tricks you can do to help get the most out of your Zend Framework/Doctrine application.

I decided to try profiling my quiz application to see if I could speed it up. Not surprisingly, biggest performance penalties came from loading classes and Doctrine’s ORM magic. [...] As you may have heard, optimizing without profiling first is a bad idea, as you may think something is slow when something completely different would be better to optimize.

some of his suggestions include:

• Removing all require_once calls from the Zend Framework library
• Change the include_once_override setting if you're using APC
• Using the query cache in Doctrine
• Using the Doctrine_Table find functions rather than the Doctrine_Query objects