Deep Research and Measurement

Showing 3 records — All programmes

• Tooling comparison

  August 20, 2026

  4 metrics

  Question

  The fixed cost of installing a PHP framework: disk size tells you nothing

  How many megabytes on disk, how many files per request and how many milliseconds on the first request do seven PHP frameworks cost — and which of those numbers actually predicts throughput under load?

  Finding

  Disk size predicts nothing: Yii2 has the largest vendor tree at 34.1 MB and loads only 62 files per request, among the fewest in the field. Files per request predicts nothing either: CodeIgniter loads 96 files and serves 6,431 req/s, Symfony loads 224 and serves 13,067. The one number that genuinely separates them is the first request served with a cold opcache: 2.2 ms for Phalcon, 72.2 ms for Laravel — thirty-three times. That is the compile bill the first visitor pays after every deploy, and it is measured in tens of milliseconds, not kilobytes.

  Measurement High confidence

• Service & load

  August 20, 2026

  4 metrics

  Question

  Seven PHP frameworks under identical load: the gap narrows as soon as the request does real work

  On the same hardware, the same PHP build and the same seven routes, how many requests a second do Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii2, Phalcon, Laminas and Slim serve, and at what latency?

  Finding

  On an empty route the fastest is 4.4× the slowest (Slim 25,975, Laravel 5,966 req/s). As soon as the request does real work the gap closes: 3.7× for a single row from the database, 3.5× for twenty rows. Phalcon is third on an empty route and fifth once a query is involved — being a C extension buys nothing while the process waits on MySQL. And the expensive decision is not the framework: Laravel's own default `web` middleware group takes the same response from 5,858 to 2,176 req/s, so one default costs more than most of the distance between the frameworks.

  Measurement Medium confidence

• Frontend performance

  August 19, 2026

  4 metrics

  Question

  How you import Chart.js decides how many kilobytes the visitor downloads

  In a real production build, what is the difference between `chart.js/auto` and a selective `Chart.register()` — in kilobytes?

  Finding

  Selective registration saves 9.7 kB gzip over `chart.js/auto` (67.8 → 58.1 kB, 14.3%). The larger drop is not in the library core but in leaving unused controllers out: a page that registers only the bar chart falls to 46.0 kB — two thirds of auto.

  Measurement High confidence

No published record matches this filter.