I have one more question, I see a number of really fat frameworks on top, if rails is faster, then it must be because it is heavily optimized and people who made it are super smart, but for example codeigniter is above slim, kohana is above fuel, like twice the speed for Fortunes test. This isn't what I would expect at all, I would also expect Rails to be below php frameworks for speed alone.

Did you use orm when it was available? Or just used raw query?

This is in line with my previous query about more usage scenarios (and thank you for fortunes test) who would be like we use them usually.

My point is, that the same reason why we use framework instead of raw language, we use orm instead of direct sql.