CakePHP 1.2 VS 1.3 VS 2.0 Page Request Times

When I first started using CakePHP a few years ago, we had a lot of complaints about speed. If you do some Google searches comparing CakePHP to other frameworks, it seems to be near the bottom of the pack. I previously wrote a few articles on optimizing CakePHP here:

Implementing the following tips certainly helped; however, if there are issues with the core framework response time, no amount of optimization will truley help. So after reading up on CakePHP 2.0 and it’s recent speed improvements, I wanted to do some straight CakePHP comparisons. Below are 10 load times for CakePHP 1.2, 1.3, and the new 2.0. These load times are of a brand new install simply loading the default home view, no database connection or any model loading.

Cake 1.2

Page load: 0.1016s
Page load: 0.1297s
Page load: 0.1101s
Page load: 0.1081s
Page load: 0.1318s
Page load: 0.1053s
Page load: 0.1068s
Page load: 0.1255s
Page load: 0.0952s
Page load: 0.1122s

Average: 0.11263s

Cake 1.3

Page load: 0.0973s
Page load: 0.0719s
Page load: 0.0814s
Page load: 0.0935s
Page load: 0.0768s
Page load: 0.1091s
Page load: 0.0593s
Page load: 0.0734s
Page load: 0.0909s
Page load: 0.0751s

Average: 0.08287s

Cake 2.0

Page load: 0.1065s
Page load: 0.0724s
Page load: 0.0599s
Page load: 0.0994s
Page load: 0.0646s
Page load: 0.0851s
Page load: 0.1018s
Page load: 0.0603s
Page load: 0.0971s
Page load: 0.0631s

Average: 0.08102s

As you can see, between CakePHP 1.2 and 1.3 there were some significant speed improvements. Almost every request was below 0.1 seconds where 1.2 only had only one request below 0.1!

So far, there doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement between 1.3 and 2.0, but there is still time. Keep up the good work CakePHP dev team!