For the greater part of the past decade, PHP's frameworks have received unfair criticism regarding their ability to manage high-volume traffic and resource-intensive transactions. Part of this was due to PHP's lack of native multi-threading support, and the other had to do with the extensive performance configurations necessary for existing MVC frameworks to perform adequately, since they often came bundled with resource-intensive libraries that had to be manually optimized or disabled.

In 2012, a new framework came to the scene called Phalcon. Phalcon has all of the traditional functionality and features that you might expect from a PHP framework, including ORMs, templating engines, caching mechanisms, authentication libraries, and a plethora of features, managing to deliver a wide array of functionality without sacrificing performance.

What makes Phalcon different, is that rather than relying on run-time loading of libraries and/or caching mechanisms to help speed things along, all of it's core components and libraries have been written in C, and compiled to run as a standard PHP extension. This approach leads to a jaw-dropping performance boost for applications built on top of Phalcon and catapults PHP into the stratosphere of heavy-lift web technology.

Although Phalcon's adoption rate is steadily increasing, there are those who have reservations about switching over due it's unorthodox deployment mechanism. For a community which is used to easily troubleshooting and building upon open source frameworks where the code is easily accessible, the fact that Phalcon is written in C rather than PHP, and cannot be modified without knowledge of the language, means that extending and troubleshooting issues will present some challenges for the uninitiated.

The good news is that the Phalcon community is making a great effort to improve, extend, and provide continuous support for the framework, and if things continue down this road, it's likely that even in a worst case scenario, Phalcon will carve a niche out for itself and find a place among organizations that have the expertise to manage it, and require systems that can handle large traffic and heavy processing, without sacrificing response times.