"Fast" is not a question of a framework, but of the coder.

You can code with any framework and cache the result.
Even dynamic pages used to prevent unauthorized users from accessing it can be made in a static way.

I'm currently coding a project meant to serve up to 1 million hits per hour (280 hits/second)  in a "hot" environment (cache filled). This is done with the Zend Framework, producing a lot of static files (even the ACL and Auth-Things can be done static).

If this works as expected, I would like to send Jon an example, maybe he can make a Zend Cast out of this.

But If you ask, if plain PHP is much faster - you know the answer already.
It's up to you how fast your apps are.

You know I would really like such video.

You can code with any framework and cache the result.
Even dynamic pages used to prevent unauthorized users from accessing it can be made in a static way.

I'm currently coding a project meant to serve up to 1 million hits per hour (280 hits/second)  in a "hot" environment (cache filled). This is done with the Zend Framework, producing a lot of static files (even the ACL and Auth-Things can be done static).

If this works as expected, I would like to send Jon an example, maybe he can make a Zend Cast out of this.

But If you ask, if plain PHP is much faster - you know the answer already.
It's up to you how fast your apps are.

a framework will never be as fast as the naked objects, however you have to ask yourself if your code is in fact slow to begin with. Often times, people perform premature optimizations on what they *think* is slow and then end up with code that's unreadable with no gain.