Question

I’m new to Symfony2 and I must admit I’m enjoying it. I started playing with the SonataAdmin but soon a major doubt popped out:
is it normal it takes almost 3 seconds to load a listing page (using an empty database)?? I know in production I should go for APC or memcache to speed up things but it looks strange to me it takes so much time.

I’m developing using a virtualmachine with Turnkey lamp (1GB ram).

My PC is fairly new: Intel i3 8Gb ram.

Please tell me what you think/experience.

Thanks.

Answer 1

In development environment, it is hard to measure performance because the framework and the bundles sometimes need to parse a lot of configuration files, introspect objects and perform time consuming task and cache the output.

In production, a lot of stuff is done upfront, i.e. when you are deploying to your web server. The work upfront is done to avoid parsing files, do time consuming task, etc. This is the reason why in production, you almost can’t change anything without running php app/console clear:cache again after the modification have been done. Even changing a single Twig template requires a cache clear to update the output presented to the end user.

I did not test this bundle personally, but an admin generator bundle needs to check a lot of properties and objects to perform his task properly. This is indeed time consuming but this is required only in development mode. When in production, this introspection process is not necessary and the information is probably cached somewhere. This should give way better performance in production environment than in development environment.

Bottom line, I don’t think this bundle suffer from a performance problem but this depends on your needs and objectives. The only thing I can be sure of: test it in production mode to see the speed it will give you in the end. Clear you cache for production mode and use app.php instead of app_dev.php. Also, check the documentation on performance that can be found on symfony.com.

php app/console cache:clear --env=prod --no-debug

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Matt