Benchmarks

According to our own benchmark suite, Kinetis wins five of six TechEmpower-style benchmark tests against seven other PHP frameworks — Laravel, Laravel Octane, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Yii2, CakePHP, and Slim — measured on isolated AWS hardware on August 15, 2026. TechEmpower sunset its own benchmark project in March 2026, so no neutral third party runs this kind of comparison anymore — which is exactly why the full methodology and every framework’s implementation are public in the benchmark repository: the numbers below are reproducible, not just reported. This page covers what was tested and what came out, not how the rig is built.

What was tested

Six TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks test types — /json, /plaintext, /db, /fortunes, /queries?queries=20, /updates?queries=20 — against identical MySQL schema and data, one implementation per framework using that framework’s own idiomatic routing, database layer, and templating. Every target runs the same production PHP configuration (opcache with a tracing JIT, timestamps disabled, access logging off) and its own ahead-of-time caching mechanism where it has one. Three separate EC2 instances — application, database, load generator — provide real machine isolation, the same methodology TechEmpower’s own benchmark used; its test types remain the de facto standard for comparing web frameworks.

Kinetis appears twice: kinetis runs on FrankenPHP worker mode, its primary deployment target; kinetis-fpm is the identical, unmodified application under classic nginx and PHP-FPM. The pair isolates what the framework’s own request handling costs from what the persistent-worker runtime adds.

The fairness rules — what was tuned, why, and what was deliberately left alone — are documented in full in the repository’s own README; they aren’t repeated here.

Versions tested

A follow-up run on the same rig confirmed that the kinetis versions below reproduce the results within run-to-run noise. The benchmark repository tracks current releases, so a fresh clone installs the latest kinetis packages.

Target	Package	Version	PHP
kinetis	kinetis/framework	1.5.4	8.5.9 (FrankenPHP, ZTS)
kinetis-fpm	kinetis/framework	1.5.4	8.4.24
slim	slim/slim	4.15.2	8.4.24
yii2	yiisoft/yii2	2.0.55	8.4.24
symfony	symfony/framework-bundle	7.4.16	8.4.24
cakephp	cakephp/cakephp	5.4.1	8.4.24
codeigniter	codeigniter4/framework	4.7.4	8.4.24
laravel	laravel/framework	13.25.0	8.4.24
laravel-octane	laravel/framework + laravel/octane	13.25.0 + 2.19.0	8.5.9 (FrankenPHP, ZTS)

kinetis/kinetis-fpm also ran kinetis/persistence 1.5.0 and kinetis/query-builder 1.2.3. FrankenPHP-based targets run a newer PHP than the PHP-FPM targets because that’s what the dunglas/frankenphp image ships — see Runtime Adapters for how Kinetis picks a runtime.

Results

Requests per second at concurrency 256; /queries and /updates run 20 queries per request. One measurement run, not an average.

Target	/json	/plaintext	/db	/fortunes	/queries (20)	/updates (20)
kinetis	27,878	27,830	19,797	16,489	4,304	1,495
slim	13,443	13,409	7,714	7,181	4,301	1,801
kinetis-fpm	10,596	10,659	6,257	5,555	2,104	1,105
yii2	9,865	10,255	6,016	5,597	2,887	1,579
codeigniter	6,250	6,256	2,188	2,038	1,588	1,207
cakephp	5,927	5,990	3,065	2,896	1,406	969
symfony	5,154	5,154	3,967	3,730	2,623	1,501
laravel-octane	5,088	5,172	4,563	4,231	1,506	868
laravel	2,555	2,560	2,025	1,884	1,065	748

kinetis wins /json, /plaintext, /db, and /fortunes outright, and /queries in a near-tie with slim. /updates is the one test kinetis doesn’t win: it’s bound by the database’s own write path (row locks, index maintenance, the redo log), and the database instance runs at the same load for every target — no application-side change moves that number. slim, the fastest boot-and-die target on every other test, wins it.

Full methodology

The benchmark repository has the complete picture: every framework’s implementation, the AWS infrastructure as code, and the fairness rules applied identically across all nine targets — everything needed to run the same sweep yourself and check these numbers directly.