Antony Dovgal has pointed out a set of benchmarks from Ilia Kantor comparing several templating methods in PHP - eighteen of them in all.

He has the page set up to where you can run your own benchmarks and see the results, making the settings like variable count and interactions easy to change. Included in his list of templating methods to test are things like:

• php_templates
• smarty
• vtemplate
• phplib
• Sigma

Some comments on the settings for the templating systems are included as well (like the compiled template caching of Smarty and Sigma).