~bohwaz/blog/

Smarty launched in the last days an alpha release of the version 3 of the template engine, claiming "very promising speed improvements over Smarty 2". OK, let's just see if it's true. I already did by the past a comparison between Smarty 2 and Template Lite. Since then a new template engine claiming compatibility with Smarty has surfaced, Dwoo, which looks very promising on features and implementation. So we'll test it as well here.

In short: Smarty 3 is always the slowest and most memory consuming engine, Dwoo is the fastest but consumes more memory than Template Lite. Smarty 3 is even slower and consumes more memory than Smarty 2, so it doesn't seem so good for "very promising improvements"... They have a lot of work before even a beta release.

In the tests below I tested each engine against a simple loading test with no template handling and three different templates, each tested without and with compilation before.

Template 1 : simple, no assign, just a few html tags and text (93B)

Template 2 : simple, one variable assign and display (105B)

Template 3 : foreach using an array with 6 rows and an escape modifier on each variable display (178B)

Loading and init of object variables

	Smarty	Smarty 3	Template Lite	Dwoo
Memory	367KB	462KB	284KB	317KB
Time	0.042s	0.047s	0.044s	0.047s

Template 1, 10,000 fetch (not compiled before)

	Smarty	Smarty 3	Template Lite	Dwoo
Memory	965KB	1,951KB	549KB	1,299KB
Time	2.141s	2.570s	1.536	1.624s
Compiled template size	201B	519B	234B	205B

Template 1, 10,000 fetch (compiled before)

	Smarty	Smarty 3	Template Lite	Dwoo
Memory	369KB	491KB	286KB	461KB
Time	2.033s	2.472s	1.936s	1.505s

Template 2, 10,000 fetch (not compiled before)

	Smarty	Smarty 3	Template Lite	Dwoo
Memory	966KB	1,964KB	550KB	1,299KB
Time	2.405s	3.190s	2.212s	1.709s
Compiled template size	243B	630B	275B	244B

Template 2, 10,000 fetch (compiled before)

	Smarty	Smarty 3	Template Lite	Dwoo
Memory	369KB	493KB	287KB	461KB
Time	2.349s	2.992s	2.209s	1.644s

Template 3, 10,000 fetch (not compiled before)

	Smarty	Smarty 3	Template Lite	Dwoo
Memory	1,013KB	2,030KB	573KB	1,361KB
Time	4.421s	6.938s	4.890s	3.609s
Compiled template size	784B	1060B	645B	690B

Template 3, 10,000 fetch (compiled before)

	Smarty	Smarty 3	Template Lite	Dwoo
Memory	417KB	518KB	309KB	527KB
Time	3.899s	6.473s	4.964s	3.430s