trying out cakephp now.

A simple page to retrieve 2 blog entries take 0.5s.

WT...

My non-framework (but still OOP) page takes 0.08s

Yea, but once you start doing more than getting two blog entries and can hit up the caching mechanisms in most frameworks you start finding the tradeoff much smaller.

It's like anything, in an over simplistic example the numbers won't jive.

Are you running the latest version of php5? It seems like they are always coming up with OOP optimization upgrades with every succeeding version. It's getting faster.

I wrote my own framework based (very loosely) on the same idea that Cake uses.

The problem is, using cookie-cutter frameworks isn't always the best solution, especially since solid PHP5 frameworks are still very young. Writing your own framework can prevent that problem. Take a close look at Cake, since it's a good base and try writing a framework that does what you need.

The problem with frameworks are that they are VERY generalized.
And to generalize frameworks, the creators have to apply A LOT OF LAYERS in between.
I agree with Justin. It's better to create your own framework. I've based mine on RoR w/o all thet time/load wasting crap like Pluralization, which waste system resource and increasing loading time. I just make my table the same name as the model. Simple and fast. No need to check the dictionary function for plurals.

Now, my super bare framework with activerecord, actionpack, activecontroller takes only 0.1s to load the same page, compared to 0.5 with cake.