Paul Jones responded to recent Symfony 2 benchmarks to show that the Solar Framework is not as slow as the original tests show and in fact if it used preloading like Symfony 2 does it would be faster..

This is something I have always thought was needed and its something I brought up in Zend Framework discussions back when I was seni-involved.

File loading has always been one of the hard points of any framework and 2 things can greatly improve this.

1. Relative paths.. If you know exactly were a class exists and do not have to rely on searching multiple paths loading can be sped up greatly
2. If you know you have to use a file why not load it anyway?

How do you take care of these 2 issues?

1. This one is pretty simple really and some frameworks are starting to take an approach I brought up at the first Zend Framework get together at a Zend Con... Path hints or registering classes.. You know any class that starts with Zend_ is part of the zend framework.. You know the path to that package, Why rely on internal paths when you can easily build a full path and load the file directly?

Its my belief that frameworks should allow you to set a default path but then also specific how certain classes are handled based on simple regex/strpos checks.. Anything that starts with "Zend_" can be found in /var/www/libraries/Zend/ for example...

2. I have pushed from the very beginning for Zend Framework and have mentioned this about Solar Framework that they need "Developer modes" and "Production Modes"... In developer mode it should do things like record how many times its been run and what files are loaded.. From this info you can then easily make a list of all classes that are pretty much "required" to be loaded and preload them in production..

You can also turn off all those checks that while they make development easier are pretty much useless in production, I mean come if your Framework can't find files in production you have a larger problem in hand and no error checking in the world is going to save you..

Anyway as Solar Framework starts moving towards a stable release I can only hope some of these ideas take hold and performance increases even further.

Enjoy