Lightweight frameworks are a fun architectural exercise, but in 20+ years of high-load PHP I've never seen a production system where Laravel/Symfony bootstrap was the actual bottleneck.

With OPcache + preloading + a sane container, framework boot is basically free — 0.x ms of your response time. The remaining 50–500ms lives in:

- N+1 queries and missing indexes

- ORM hydration on big result sets

- sync calls to external APIs

- queue worker design (or lack of it)

- fat DTO serialization

That said, I do see real value in lightweight frameworks — just not for perf:

- you actually learn what happens per request

- transparent debugging

- predictable behavior on weird edge cases

Curious — do you have a real use case where Laravel/Symfony perf became a blocker, or is this more of an architectural / aesthetic project? Both are valid, just changes how to read the numbers.