Could you elaborate on this? It sounds a bit far-fetched that Symfony (a PHP framework) would solely be responsible for losing a company 2 huge contracts and laying off 1/3 of their workforce. 10s of thousands of function calls for a home page? What did the home page do?

I personally have been very impressed by Symfony (version 1.1 was just released this week so it sounds like your experience was with version 1.0 or a beta version), the Symfony community, the IRC channel and the documentation (a full print version book which is really well-written with all of the contents available online for free as well). In the few benchmarks I've seen that actually bothered to include Symfony, it seems to measure up quite well.

Symfony powers Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Answers and at least some portion of Delicious, by the way.

(Sorry to jump in with a first post questioning what you've said, but I would like to understand better what your experience was in order to be aware of potential pitfalls that may be lurking around the bend for me.)