Per my experience, CakePHP is probably one of the slowest PHP frameworks. It has a large overhead and lots of legacy code that slows down the whole system. Gene

Per my experience, CakePHP is probably one of the slowest PHP frameworks. It has a large overhead and lots of legacy code that slows down the whole system. Generally, frameworks targeted at PHP 5.3+ are faster. PHP 5.4 has further performance boost in production and PHP 5.5 has Zend Optimizer built-in, which suppose to further speed up but I have never try that in production.