TLDR: I agree with OP.

very small, very fast, and it certainly got nothing i don’t need

You make some good points and I agree with you pretty much across the board but with a couple exceptions and notes:

About the productivity: hell yes, using a framework increases productivity. Once you learn it that is. At the time I wrote the post I was in the throes of learning ZF and, as I’m sure you know, ZF has a hell of a learning curve. Was it unfair of me to blame all frameworks for this? Yes it was. 100% my bad on that. You could relate my mindset at the time I wrote the post to yours when you responded

Since getting up to speed with ZF I’ve definitely seen the light in framework land though I still reserve the right to hate specific frameworks (I’m looking at you Akelos).

People always tout that hardware is cheap; it’s a cliche at this point. It is true that adding hardware will solve pretty much all software problems but that’s only true if you can actually get the hardware (I’ve had problems with this way too many times).

For example, I’ve worked at places where getting money for hardware wasn’t easy (almost impossible) and would require HUGE amounts of notice, research and preparation (read: reports). On top of that the programmers would be responsible for maintaining and managing the new hardware. Not the norm I know, and that probably has more to do with my perception of performance than anything else. Consequently, I’ve never seen the logic in counting on hardware to fix performance issues except if there was nothing else left to do. In hindsight, probably not the healthiest outlooks.

That being said (and because I think you called me out on this); I’ve always been careful about NOT prematurely optimizing anything. I get how absolutely stupid that would be. I’ve personally seen programmers waste days making tweaks to code that amount to nothing significant in the grand scheme (and then having it all undone through QA). As you pointed out in your first comment a hundredth of a percent decrease in time is meaningless in the grand scheme.

Thanks for the insight. I feel like this discussion added to the post.

* if mvc-frameworks don’t increase your productivity, you may do something very wrong. for small projects i used a certain (mvc-)microframework a lot, and i love it. it feels like a big step in evolution, and i love how incredibly fast i’m able to implement small projects.
* procedural programming may be a nuance faster and more memory efficient, but it makes developement hard. i have to work with a huge (homegrown, but not by me) 1998-style php3 procedural programming cms at work, and it’s dev hell. mixed php/html, no oop, untestable, … – sorry i got worked up a bit, but i have to deal with this on a daily basis, and it’s NOT FUN.
* you may be right: for some huge applications (like reddit, facebook, …) with trendemous traffic a full blown framework may be too slow and/or memory hungry. it may pay off to write everthing from scratch there, on the other hand, additional machines are often cheaper in this case.
* normally, dev-time is more expensive than hardware.
* “OOP is way more expensive than procedural” – true. but is it TOO expensive, performance-wise? definitley not. a project often gets expensive when it comes to maintainability, though. and in almost all cases, procedural programming is definitley harder to maintain than a nice, oop’d mvc-application.
* almost all php applications spend more time waiting for the database than script execution itself.
* in my personal experience, i encountered 2 projects where “php was too slow”, and both times it boiled down to bad algorithms (n², anyone?). ok, there was one more time, when the whole CMS was used to answer a trivial ajax request. as soon those got rewritten, everything went smooth again. and as soon as you’re able to enable caching (not possible everywhere, but still), performance really doesn’t matter anymore!
* you know the old saying: it doesn’t have to be really fast, it just has to be fast *enough*
* “at the end of the day …” – may be at the end of the week, if you don’t go for maintainability and ease-of-developement. optimizing in the case of going viral will certainly be cheaper than maintaining prematurely optimized code.

sorry, i didn’t want to be impolite, but your article was just too absurd.

going back to procedural programming … heh.

You laid out kind of a rant (albeit, with some points buried inside that left me with questions) and for the sake of anyone else who reads this I wanted to respond. And yes, I admit, I couldn’t really help myself from responding either.

First, I was using the move to procedural as an option (yes, a bad option) for fixing the issues I was seeing at the time. I honestly thought the absurdity of the statement was obvious when I was writing it. My bad on thinking people wouldn’t jump at a chance to show how smart they are I guess.

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Then you rant some more with nothing to respond to. It kinda speaks for itself… (Congrats on the Haskel reference).
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Next, who said anything about building a reddit (or similar)? And why would I have to build a site on that scale to worry about performance and resource usage?

Lastly, I never said anything about OOP being too slow for web development. What I was doing was posing a question about the resource usage I saw during development. Hell, I even pointed out in the above comment, when the memory usage dropped from 7MB to 1.5MB, that framework performance wasn’t an issue.

even better, write your own webserver specialized in what you want to do! can you even imagine what overhead apache/nginx/lighttpd imposes on your requests?

you’re certainly writing the new reddit/facebook/twitter, so obviously expensive frameworks aren’t for you. if your script needs 1,5mb per request (as you said in your comment), your server are capped at ~2,600 concurrent requests (memory-wise, don’t get me startet on response-time!), assuming 4gb of available memory (wait, twitter is partly built on ruby, the one of the slowest languages known to man, d’oh).

i can’t think i ever read something as dumb as accusing OOP as being too slow for web developement. i have to stop and cool down now. good luck going procedural.

To me, premature optimization involves rewriting and restructuring chunks of code that has yet to be proven necessary or useful. This is not what I was talking about.

No, what I was trying to convey was noticing the HUGE overhead while doing trivial things like bootstrapping and database calls. I’ve learned it’s just, well, frankly, naive, to blindly develop without knowing the impact your development is having on the stability and integrity of the project as a whole and so I am always keeping an eye on my development.

That being said, I have (just today) uploaded my ZF site to my production server for testing and noticed just an amazing decrease in memory and CPU usage. On my development machine (using php 5.3 & Apache 2.2) each page was taking around 7MB of memory. On my production server (php 5.2.11 & Apache 2.2 with PHP Accelerator) each page was taking about 1.5MB so there was a pretty impressive improvement from development to production.