Actually, as soon as a lot of db connections are involved, PHP jumps to the head of the pack.
Which means that in most common web use cases (which are db heavy), PHP is as fast as any of them, since all the slowdowns (initialization, slow Zend engine etc) are dwarfed out by the fast db handling.
Raw PHP (with no framework, no ORM) does well in the 20 query test, but unfortunately you have to go down pretty far before any of the PHP frameworks show up on that list.
If I filter to just show PHP, the 20 query test shows that the first framework is less than 50% the performance of raw PHP.
Yes, it does look like none of the frameworks are using persistent connections, which would explain the horrible performance. To be fair though, it is still a valid measurement if the frameworks don't enable persistent connections by default.
> it is still a valid measurement if the frameworks don't enable persistent connections by default
I don't agree. Frameworks often prefer the "safe" option over "performance" by default. If you activate persistent connections by raw coding it [1] then you should also set an absolutely obvious database configuration flag like [2] in a framework.
Which means that in most common web use cases (which are db heavy), PHP is as fast as any of them, since all the slowdowns (initialization, slow Zend engine etc) are dwarfed out by the fast db handling.