Assuming that the PHP frameworks are not just all terribly written (which seems unlikely), what this shows us is that the PHP interpreter is very slow, but the

Assuming that the PHP frameworks are not just all terribly written (which seems unlikely), what this shows us is that the PHP interpreter is very slow, but the libraries that PHP uses are fast. The raw PHP benchmark doesn't actually have very much PHP code, so the slowness of the interpreter doesn't matter much, while the PHP frameworks (other than Yaf) all have a great deal of PHP code.