So i’ve been a long time fan of symfony, and have used it quite regularly on large projects.  It’s been pretty good and has helped me developed sites rather quickly.  However, i’ve felt that the framework has been getting too large and effecting performance, and recently they’ve also decided to switch to the Doctrine ORM, which i’ve found very unreliable for large data sets. For these reasons i’ve decided to switch to the codeigniter framework on my latest project and i’ve been quite happy with the results.

First, the code igniter framework is a lot less code than symfony (and much easier to install).   The result it seems, is a faster snappier website.  Additionally, digging through the code igniter framework to see what’s going on, is 10x easier than going through the symfony framework base code.  I know some ppl will argue that the caching on symfony should make it just as fast, but honestly, I dont see it.  I’ve tried many different caching strategies that they outline online and in the forums, but code igniter’s simple view template strategy seems much faster.

Code igniter currently doesn’t come with a default ORM.  Because of the lack of an ORM, pulling data from the database is much faster compared to Doctrine’s access.  I was running a 4million record database that linked to a 2 million record database.  Doctrine pretty much puked on this.  I haven’t seen an issue yet with this with the Code igniter database class.  I think the many abstraction layers that Doctrine has results in unnecessary classes which leads to slower results access and increases the chances of memory leaks.  Say what you may, but these are the results that i’ve found for my website.