[eluser]tonanbarbarian[/eluser]
i have not really reviewed kohana, but a few years ago i compared CI to Cake and even wrote a post about it in here somewhere
the main difference between the 2 is that cake will do so much stuff automatically, such as loading related data, but it is not easy to turn any of that off.
the end result is using CI is easier and it ends up performing better
this is because CI is NOT doing all of the extra bells and whistles which in a lot of cases you do not need.
take for example the case where you have a site that does some simple crud
you can list the records from a table, add, edit and delete them.
now in Cake if there is a related table and you have told the model about the relation then every time you select 1 or more records from the main table all of the related records are also retrieved from the database, whether you need them or not. this takes extra processing time and uses extra memory
then take the example of you are editing a record and decide to cancel the edit and return to the list of records
now if you create a method called cancel which redirects to the list page (i know you could link directly to the list but humor me) in CI you can write it so that nothing but the redirect happens, no connection to the database, no queries run etc, but in cake it will always connect to the database and in this case may even query the database whether you want it to or not.
so basically CI can be coded easily to use way less resources than Cake
The test example I did a few years ago had a CI and Cake app built to to CRUD on a simple table.
The CI app even had a bit more functionality like filtering of the records, which I did not add to the Cake version
The CI version of the page used less than 1 Meg or memory to process the pages
The Cake version used nearly 3 Mb I beleive.
Now this does not sound that dramatic you might think
But if you have a server receiving lots of traffic you want each request to process as quickly as possible and to use as little memory as possible so that you site and the server performs as well as possible.
That is one of the reasons I use CI over Cake
