A few interesting observations made by rvdavid; After investigating a recommendation to use Doctrine by a fellow blogger, Brian at Real of Zod, I have decided to run with Doctrine as my Domain Model in Zend Framework projects. The thing is, if I’m going to commit to this, I need to know that applications I build in the future with the Zend Framework while using Doctrine as an integral part of the Model layer will not take performance hits from things like memory usage.
With Doctrine doing a _lot_ of magic, I thought that this would be something that I wanted to see for myself.
4MB Memory to execute a simple Query?!?! Ffffff#$#!!!!
A quick google search took me to a Question posted on StackOverflow about Doctrine Memory Usage. The concerned OP was asking if he had a server misconfiguration or if this was normal for Doctrine to be using so much memory for a simple query. He posted a 4MB difference in Peak Memory Usage between the start of the request before the Doctrine Query was executed and after the Doctrine Query was executed. After reading that, I was a little nervous.
Use Opcode Caching to reduce Memory Usage.
Test Results on Memory Usage of Zend Framework and Doctrine with APC: http://bit.ly/620pfS