I agree with @roman-kulish, an event-driven (asynchronous, non-blocking) framework cannot be compared with PHP (blocking, synchronous). The best benchmark the PHP world can offer is the raw PHP which is missing an ORM/Framework and multiple layers that try to make the software more structured and maintainable.
We're using PHP because it helps us to create robust web applications with rich frontends, api backends, etc. with almost the same syntax/framework without no-knowledge of network stuff.
Comparing Phalcon/Cake/Zend/Rails or any other synchronous framework with a network framework like Netty is useless.
A network oriented framework can be compared with Twisted, Tornado or Nodejs. There are no middleware intermediates like Apache/Nginx when using these frameworks so they can offer better performance but you need more effort to make them work like PHP.