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

It depends on how you use Smarty because the flow of your pages can change

Classic plain PHP flow:

• Output
• Handle $_REQUEST data
• Output
• Handle database queries
• Output
• Handle $_REQUEST data
• Output
• ...

Classic Smarty flow:

• Handle all $_REQUEST data
• Handle all database queries
• Output all

If plain PHP took 1.0 sec for this page the Smarty page also takes 1.0 sec. BUT if we assume that all database and $_request handeling takes 0.7 sec. The plain PHP starts output directly while the Smarty version starts outputing after 0.7 sec. Therefor the browser can start downloading stylesheets and images faster. No output also means the "Stop" button has no effect.

However in Smarty you can call functions and methods from within the template. Delaying the slow part to where the data is needed.