Service & load

Finding

On four cores Go carried 57,321 mixed requests a second, FrankenPHP 25,659 and php-fpm 20,606 — 14,330, 6,415 and 5,152 per core. The number that goes into a capacity plan is not that one but application CPU per request: 66.8, 110.7 and 187.7 microseconds. At saturation FrankenPHP uses only 2.84 of its four cores, against Go's 3.83 and php-fpm's 3.87. The database is not the constraint: on the same four cores PostgreSQL alone writes 68,212 rows a second, above the mixed ceiling of the fastest candidate.

Finding

On an empty route the fastest is 4.4× the slowest (Slim 25,975, Laravel 5,966 req/s). As soon as the request does real work the gap closes: 3.7× for a single row from the database, 3.5× for twenty rows. Phalcon is third on an empty route and fifth once a query is involved — being a C extension buys nothing while the process waits on MySQL. And the expensive decision is not the framework: Laravel's own default `web` middleware group takes the same response from 5,858 to 2,176 req/s, so one default costs more than most of the distance between the frameworks.