This article covering a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf on the issue of scaling PHP and PHP Frameworks is a couple of months old but keeps popping up on Delicious. There’s a lot to disagree with there, especially if you read through the comments by other people who were in the audience for the talk, but the thing that stood out for me benchmarking covered in the “Hello World” section.

Please please please tell me the reporter misunderstood Rasmus’ point, as some have suggested in the comments section. I can only hope Rasmus (who, btw, is a vocal member of the Nike+ Running community that I work on at R/GA and has written the SlowGeek site to improve on some features he felt we were lacking) would not make a big deal out of such a naive example. So you’re telling me that “Hello World” printed out directly from a PHP file is orders of magnitude quicker than “Hello World” printed out through a PHP Framework? Amazing. I will immediately concede that if your intention is to write and scale a “Hello World” application CodeIgniter or other PHP frameworks are not for you.

It’s like saying that it takes longer to get to the corner store if you take you helicopter as opposed to walking. Sure, you have to suit up, start up the rotors, take off, find a good landing spot, step over the dead bodies, etc. But that’s not practical is it? Either is a “Hello World” example.

Look, I’m perfectly willing to accept that CodeIgniter will be slower than a hand-crafted framework when all is said and done. That alone is the reason I don’t use any ORM in my code. It can’t possibly be faster. But for something at my scale it makes configuration, development, and maintenance very easy. And in the wise words of the fine developers at Coding Horror, programmers are expensive and hardware is cheap. To a certain scale, you can just throw hardware at your problem.

That said, I’m sure Rasmus understands that and the reporter took him out of context. Right….?