Why would anyone want to run Laravel when it runs so much slower than raw PHP? Surely the development time saved is negated by the amount of optimisation work required?

My first PHP framework I worked on was Laravel, but clients could not afford a hosting plan with its requirements so I switched to CakePHP and never looked back.

There is Lumen, the lightweight version of Laravel

@CatMDV Lumen is still almost 1000x slower than raw php7.

It is a problem with the share nothing execution model of php, it is basically impossible to make a fast high level php framework without building a custom runtime for it.

I think I can live with 30ms page loads instead of 5ms