I'll bite. I write CakePHP apps for my clients, and I've heard this "cake is slow" meme before. Never been a problem for us, and we've shipped a lot of apps.

In almost all cases, the benchmark was done with no caching. I don't know who launches web apps with no caching, but they shouldn't be doing benchmarks.

I don't concede that Cake is slow for any meaningful definition, but as a matter of point - I'll trade faster developers for a couple CPU cycles any day of the week.