PHP ORM Benchmark

Overview

This repository contains benchmarks for some of the most popular PHP ORMs, used as a reference for performance optimizations in my personal project compositephp/db.

The ORMs benchmarked include:

• Doctrine ORM
• Laravel ORM
• Cycle ORM
• CompositePHP DB

Methodology

The benchmark executes 10 000 CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations to assess the performance of each ORM. Operations include:

1. Creating a new record in the database.
2. Reading the record by primary key.
3. Updating one field for the found record.
4. Deleting the record.

Database

• MySQL 8.0
• Table used for the benchmark:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS Users
(
    `id` INTEGER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
    `name` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    `age` INTEGER NOT NULL,
    `microtime` FLOAT NOT NULL,
    `created_at` TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP NOT NULL
);

Hardware

MacBook Pro with Apple M2 Pro Chip and 12‑Core CPU.

Results

The following table summarizes the performance of each ORM in terms of execution time, memory usage, and peak memory usage:

ORM	Time (seconds)	Memory Kb	Memory Peak Mb
Laravel ORM	61.51	4950.91	8.063
Cycle ORM	44.32	288.15	7.007
Doctrine ORM	37.45	870.24	6.408
CompositePHP	24.71	143.46	2.217

Running Locally

Requirements

• PHP 8.1+
• Docker
• Composer
• PDO_MySQL extension

Steps

1. Clone or download this repository
2. Run composer update
3. Execute docker-compose up
4. Run benchmarks for each ORM separately:
   • php src/test-laravel.php
   • php src/test-cycle.php
   • php src/test-doctrine.php
   • php src/test-composite.php

Note

This is a synthetic benchmark focused on speed and memory consumption and does not compare the feature list of the ORMs. Feel free to note any problems, inaccuracies, or shortcomings in using these ORMs and make a pull request to fix them.