ZF2 module loading performance

Question

As far as I understand, every enabled module in a ZF2 application is loaded for every request (unless one uses optimization methods such as that offered by the zf2-lazy-loading-module module). I've been keeping an eye on modules that get published on modules.zendframework.org and I've come across modules which offer extremely limited functionality, such as the AkrabatFormatUkTelephone module which purpose is to format phone numbers to UK format.

Whilst I understand development should focus on creating single purpose modules that are good at doing one thing (instead of modules which do many things but not in a very good way), I'm thinking if we start using modules which offer such limited functionality as the one mentioned, we will need to combine hundreds of modules in order to build a rich application which could be disastrous for performance. Instead I would expect this sort of functionality to be put in a class (e.g. Zend\I18n?) and loaded on demand which would be more optimized. But knowing Akrabat's reputation I'm thinking I must be missing something, hence my question:

Is the loading of modules such as the one I mentioned significantly worse for performance than loading the same functionality via PHP classes (or is it similar due to the way ZF2 has been designed)? Does anybody have any figures (i.e. is it 5%, 10%, 15% slower) about module vs class loading performance?

Answer 1

Don't take this comment as a final answer, as hopefully someone of the ZF2 devs will shed some more insight to it, but generally only Module.php and usually module.config.php will be actively loaded. Everything else will simply be registered and be called on demand. So as long as your Module.php and module.config.php are not TOO big in filesize, the performance shouldn't be THAT big of an issue

In the case of Akrabats example, all that's happening is, the registry of a new ViewHelper. Nothing else. The same with all other view helpers inside of Zend. Performance won't really matter a lot in these cases.

Personally the Skeleton loaded with 80ms on my Webspace and with BjyAuthorize, ZfcBase, ZfcUser and my own module, the loading time ramped up to 100ms. And this is without any sort of memory caching enabled!