CodeIgniter vs Kohana: which one to choose?

[eluser]nmweb[/eluser]
I switched to Kohana after having using CI for a long while. The lack of progress in CI was what annoyed me, not so much the sticking to php4. I felt that CI kept me back from using proper OO and design patterns. CI has helped me a lot but for me it was just time to move on.

The CI community indeed is larger but you'll find the Kohana community is just as helpful.

On the topic of speed I think CI is a little faster with a simple hello world application but Kohana becomes faster the minute you use a database. Overall I find it not really an issue when you compare CI and Kohana to frameworks like Symphony or Cake which are significantly slower. I mean I use Kohana's ORM extensively since it speeds up development time and when performance of the web application becomes an issue, I can always remove ORM and rewrite the methods in normal php. Besides, 20% of the performance of an application is determined server-side, meaning 80% of the performance is client-side and you can easily improve a lot there with gzip, image sprites, javascript packers etc.