Choice of OR Mapper for a new project

Question

We are about to start a new project. It will be a group of web aplications with a good number of shared components. It will have up to 50.000 unique users visits per day and It will be some kind of management panel. All projects will be build in asp.net mvc 2 and they will all work on the one SQL Server database.

We've been very into the NHibernate until I found the ormbattle.net website, where performance tests for a NHibernate looks very poor in comparison with other mappers. In this summary I've found library unknown to me before. BLToolkit looks really promising, but there are both - advantages and disadvantages.

BLToolkit has weak community support, very few examples and I don't really heard about someone who used it in a big project. Also it's very lightweight which means that it do not support many-many relations, lazy loading and caching...

On the other hand the performance is really great, and also it has very good Linq support.

In this case I'm between choosing one of those ways:

1. Don't care so much about performance and use Nhibernate or EF or just L2SQL (which one will be better?) and use ORMapper that has mauch more useful functionality.
2. Focus on that great performance, and build some own solution based on this BLToolkit, using this library mainly as a very good base. Probably I don't need caching if I will use actions caching in MVC. Probably I don't need associations as far as I can write good LINQ queries with a join expressions. Probably I don't need lazy loading as far as I will carefully build exact methods that will get from DB all I need.

I'm not searching for a verdict it this case. What I'm asking for is a little discussion, to point me some problems that I did not considered or just sharing some experience with me about using not only BLToolkit but also other or mappers.

Answer 1

BLToolkit is awesome with great community on russian forum, you can easily ask your questions in English, as most of members of this community know english.