There are a lot of ZF (Zend Framework) and framework performance numbers in general being thrown around and a lot of arms being raised in revolt and reasons being given to why ZF comes out slow in these "simple" tests.

The truth is ZF used to be lighting fast. When I was deeply involved with ZF matter fact I am still listed on the contributor page I did some benchmarking against Solar because well Paul did a bunch of benchmarking against some other frameworks and ZF came out extremely slow in his results, in the end it seemed like it might of been APC issues on his end.

Those benchmarks
http://www.cyberlot.net/framework-benchmarking

9 months later as didn't care for the direction ZF was going and tried to bring it up, tried to suggest they needed to start looking at performance but it was always glossed over....

Then Paul referenced some thing I did in his talk at php|works which gave me the urge to test

Pauls page
http://paul-m-jones.com/public/benchmarking-2007.pdf

My results
http://www.cyberlot.net/direction-zend-framework

ZF is getting slow and slower and no matter how much people want to defend it if a race car can't do 0-60 in a decent time its not a good race car.

It has been hinted that ZF 1.7 will be a performance focused release.. Here is to hoping they haven't dug themselves to deep of a whole to climb out of without some major project killing api changes.