What's even funnier is that in javaland they took advantage of long-lived objects by having deep and broad class hierarchies, with all code in instantiated objects ... which the PHP community emulated in their frameworks, instantiating a bazillion objects on every request just to throw them away immediately. IMHO it's no surprise that in the techempower benchmarks raw php is orders of magnitude faster than a symfony implementation.

From my investigations, a lot of the time symphony spends just using the classloader. i.e., it can't load dependencies fast enough.