As a developer it’s all too easy to blame a framework for your applications bad performance. Before you do you might like to ask if you’re contributing to the problem. Most developers don’t think about what they’re really doing or how they could improve performance. I’ve seen a lot of code where every request results in at least one database query even though the database rarely changes.

Below are some stats for an application using the Zend Framework:

PHP – 36 requests/second

PHP + APC – 111 requests/second

PHP + APC + Memcache – 2,048 requests/second

By spending around 3 minutes to add code so the pages output is cached I’ve been able to improve performance 56 times without needing to throw out the framework. Of course this is an extreme example but it applies to most CMS, blogs, etc…