I'm looking for a PHP framework. I did a research here and found CodeIgniter would be best for me. But then I discovered that there is Kohana based on CodeIgniter. And I'm annoyed, because since Kohana is based on CodeIgniter, it should work similar, but it is optimized for PHP 5, so it should be faster in a PHP 5 environment. I was going to choose Kohana and then I found benchmarks that points CodeIgniter as the faster one. I don't understand it. If Kohana is updated more frequently and optimized for PHP 5, shouldn't it be better then?

I'm experienced PHP programmer, but Smarty is the only framework I know, and I don't want to waste next few month for learning a bad framework.

Thanks for your reply, I will give Kohana a try.