I am at the point in my design where I am contemplating dropping the MVC design for performance reasons, not sure if straight out PHP pages with header/footer includes would out perform my MVC setup (using PHP/Zend). I have a feeling it would.
Comments?
What's the value of your time? Of your productivity? Of your code's maintainability?
vs.
What's the cost of an additional server?
It depends on what you're building. MVC can certainly be overkill for some things, and not even applicable to others. Weigh that against future maintenance, working with other developers, how much of the MVC design pattern are you going to be rewriting on your own, etc.
This article discusses MVC, and its inventor's new paradigm DCI that is possible going to be a challenger for traditional OO.
I'm familiar with MVC from its original Smalltalk-80 context. The decision on whether to use MVC or something else is about clarity of the code, not performance. If there are particular problems with the performance of MVC in PHP, I don't know about them.
But again, the primary reason to move toward MVC is that separation of concerns is an important value in ensuring that software is supportable and maintainable over time.
I agree with Jarrod. MVC pattern will make big projects maintainable but it will make small projects longer to implement. It helps to strike the right balance.