An opinionated comparison benchmark of the latest versions of Smarty v5 and Twig v3.
The main differences from other benchmarks you might run into:
- Both engines are tested with auto-escaping turned on
- This is because you shouldn't be relying on your template developers to manually escape variables, ever. It's asking for XSS trouble.
- Doing a benchmark that disables auto-escaping can hide performance problems in a part of the template engine you definitely want to be using.
The test templates are pretty simple:
- Extending one base template and overriding its blocks
- 3 blocks, with varying default content
- A single for loop, outputting elements of an array within one block
Don't take my word for it:
composer installphp bench.php smarty,php bench.php smarty_reuse,php bench.php twigorphp bench.php twig_reuse
Or, if you want to change the number of iterations (defaults to 100.000):
php bench.php smarty 42,php bench.php smarty 999999
With Smarty 5.4.0 and Twig 3.11.0, on PHP 8.3, 1.000.000 iterations, compile time ignored, cache warmed, my machine:
| Benchmark | Time Taken |
|---|---|
| twig | 9.2 seconds |
| twig_reuse | 8.5 seconds |
| smarty | 9.5 seconds |
| smarty_reuse | 8.8 seconds |
See the code for the difference between the normal and reuse scenarios (basically: using the same Template instance, versus loading the template again.)