An interesting post on the Doctrine blog. Plus the word of the day. Yes, it’s a real word.

I want to sensibilize you for the fact that there are a lot of factors in PHP application performance and that you can very easily lose the performance that you hoped to gain by not using framework X or Z or building your own (”Not Invented Here”-syndrome) by several orders of magnitude through rather trivial errors or misconceptions.

This is also the run-on sentence of the day. But nevermind, I believe his point is that although you might think a complicated database abstraction layer like Doctrine would make things slower than simple selects, updates, deletes you’d be wrong. Using a framework developed by guys who, like the author, have thought through and benchmarked all this stuff is a big advantage. You only have to weigh that against the pain of the initial learning curve. Or maybe it’s like cycling – you’ll get faster but it will always hurt.