Using Zend Framework for highload projects

Question

Zend Framework is a good framework but not very fast. Can you tell whether it\'s worth using Zend Framework for highload projects, for example, for email marketing service t

Answer 1

We've used ZF in a lot of high traffic sites, and we've had no issues so far. We did have to jump through a few low-hanging hoops, though.

Some suggestions:

• use Zend_Queue to help with batch mailing
• use Zend_Cache whenever possible
• Use plugin loader cache
• Strip require_once calls in favor of autoloading
• Get rid of components you don't want. (as suggested, you would not need MVC stack for CLI / mail)
• We chose Sphinx in favor of Zend_Search_Lucene (enormous performance gain)

The bottom line for us has been this: development time is much, much more expensive than hardware. The flexiblity and higher re-use of code completely trumps any minor performance losses we had to deal with. For the most part, the performance overhead was very fixed.