Smarty benchmark, anyone?

Question

I am considering Smarty as my web app templating solution, and I am now concerned with its performance against plain PHP.

The Smarty site says it should be the same

Answer 1

Because in the end, Smarty compiles and caches the templates files to native PHP-code, there is indeed no theoretical performance difference. Of course there will always be some performance loss due to the chunk of Smarty-code that needs to be interpreted every time.