Zend framework on VPS?

I'm thinking about using Zend for my new project. But I'm worried about using too much system resources. I'm o开发者_运维问答n the $20 Linode VPS

Will it be worth it?

What resources are you worried about? Size-on-disk you can predict easily.

For memory and cpu it is harder. You could say that there is always a balance: If you make a small app, you can probably do a better job to code everything yourself. Any framework will give you overhead. But the bigger it gets, the harder it gets to write good code yourself. A framework will help you, and in the end you will be better off using a framework just because of the better your code will be (assuming you use it correctly).

So it is a really hard question to answer, without specifics. Gut feeling does tell me you would not go too wrong by starting with Zend. I've seen a couple of smaller, not-to-high-end environments using Zend with success.

The big question is how much traffic are you seeing?

100 visitors a day?
1,000 visitors a day?
10,000 visitors a day?

I was running a Zend Framework site on a Rackspace Cloud server with similar specs to your $20 Linode VPS. It operated just fine, but I only had maybe 50 visitors a day.

Zend Framework uses an Autoloader so it's pretty lazy in the files that it loads into memory. I've found ZF to be pretty quick for a framework of its size.

As the others have said, it depends on the traffic that you're both getting and expect to receive over time. I have a basic vps for one project and it works fine, but that was after standard tuning of Apache and MySQL. This includes disabling unrequired services, adjusting logging and KeepAlive timeout, amongst other variables (Apache) and tuning various caches (MySQL)

There's a lot that you can do to tune Zend Framework - which I'm quite keen on. Check out the talk by Rob Allen from the PHP London 2011 Conference for some great information.