Framework Comparison and Overhead

Question

I am working on a Facebook game which is developed using Zend framework. Right now I don't have lots of traffic and already seen quite a large # of data usage / CPU time.

Actually, I'm not good at Zend. I good at coding from scratch for both PHP & JS.

so, I am curious about the performance of Zend framework. becuase I'm thinking about rebuilding the applciation using Zend as the backend to manage the data / session / logic. and use JS (native code or JQuery) for the front-end rendering UI and handle user action in the client side.

In between, use aJax to get data from Zend backend.. most likely REST.
Anyone has suggestion about this kind of structure? I want to cut down the server load by that and also easier to manage code, plus better user experience.

Appreciate if anyone has good idea. :)

(POST few days later)

so, baseline PHP should be faster and use less data transfer (if code correctly) then Zend (or any) framework, right? Code reusablility is not a big concern here. :)

Answer 1

One thing many php developers fall victim of is sacrificing good architecture and sound principles for what they perceive as performance.

You may decide to cut corners in your code, but remember, "premature optimization is the root of all evil". So if you need to optimize early make sure that you're actually doing something useful.

The Zend libraries are engineered with best practice in mind, not necessarily performance. The rationale is that there are many ways to speed things up later without sacrificing code maintenance and readability (caching, load balancing, hardware, queue management, etc).

That been said, I don't think what you're looking for are statistics on ZF's performance, but rather advice on how to setup your application with it. Specifically, I'd advise you to create a dedicated, very light bootstrap for ajax requests. In ajax, you would normally only need some minimal prerequisites before dropping inside your controller. For the non ajax requests, set them up normally using the recommended architecture (bootstrap, front controller+plugins, controller+helpers, model+views+helpers).

My personal rule of thumb is that if I only am going to serve about 100 requests throughout the day, then there's very little reason to optimize anything. When the application starts feeling sluggish, if it generates enough revenue, maybe I can get a dedicated server, if not, there are always solutions such as apc, memcached, beanstalkd, etc.