Please explaining this Symfony2 vs ZendFramework 2 performance results

By default, the DoctrineORMModule integration has no kind of caching active.

You have to set caching for your mappings in the configuration:

'doctrine' => [    'driver' => [        'orm_default' => [            'class' => 'Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Driver\DriverChain',            'drivers' => [],            'cache' => 'apc',        ],    ],],

The default cache is array. Otherwise, parsing of annotations and any other kind of mappings will happen at each request.

Since I'm also maintainer of the ZF2-Doctrine2 integration, I may also be interested in finding out more about this topic. Do you have a test environment to show?

With proper caching of opcode (APC) and of DB requests (for example with Memcache), I would say that the difference between Synmfony and Zend will be peanuts.

Never choose a framework because of such a small perf difference. You'll gain much more perfs with caching and DB improvements that on the framework.

Unless you are building a finance real time app, or kinda, 10 or 20ms difference in response time is nothing. The average response time for a web page is usually in 100s of ms !

Also, converting a response time to a "number of requests per second" makes no sense, although I know this is common in PHP benchmarks. Because your Apache is not going to treat requests sequentially (one requests does not consume 100% CPU), 5 requests arriving at the same time will be served in less time than 5x the time for one request.

As Ocramius said, you should activate metadata cache:

    $frontendOptions = array(       'lifetime' => 7200, // seconds       'automatic_serialization' => true    );    $backendOptions = array(        'cache_dir' => APPLICATION_PATH_CACHE    );    $this->cache = Zend_Cache::factory('Core',                                 'File',//Memcache is better                                 $frontendOptions,                                 $backendOptions);    //ADD a metadata cache for DB, important for perf    Zend_Db_Table_Abstract::setDefaultMetadataCache($this->cache);