An Smarty versus Twig benchmark

An opinionated comparison benchmark of the latest versions of Smarty v5 and Twig v3.

Opinionated How?

The main differences from other benchmarks you might run into:

• Both engines are tested with auto-escaping turned on
  • This is because you shouldn't be relying on your template developers to manually escape variables, ever. It's asking for XSS trouble.
  • Doing a benchmark that disables auto-escaping can hide performance problems in a part of the template engine you definitely want to be using.

Templates

The test templates are pretty simple:

• Extending one base template and overriding its blocks
• 3 blocks, with varying default content
• A single for loop, outputting elements of an array within one block

Running Yourself

Don't take my word for it:

• composer install
• php bench.php smarty, php bench.php smarty_reuse, php bench.php twig or php bench.php twig_reuse

Or, if you want to change the number of iterations (defaults to 100.000):

• php bench.php smarty 42, php bench.php smarty 999999

Results

With Smarty 5.4.0 and Twig 3.11.0, on PHP 8.3, 1.000.000 iterations, compile time ignored, cache warmed, my machine:

Benchmark	Time Taken
twig	9.2 seconds
twig_reuse	8.5 seconds
smarty	9.5 seconds
smarty_reuse	8.8 seconds

See the code for the difference between the normal and reuse scenarios (basically: using the same Template instance, versus loading the template again.)