Drupal 8 is known for being heavier and slower than Drupal 7. However, Drupal 8 doesn't deserve this image and I think it got this image from lazy benchmarking: Testers just install Drupal's default profile, run some ab tests and call it a day. This is not a realistic test! Real Drupal websites will have hundreds of pages, menu items, configuration objects, more complex theming, more modules etc.

I did some more extensive testing to compare our Drupal 7 products with the Drupal 8 versions that are to be released next week. The beautiful thing (for this test) about our products is that we maintain them with feature parity across Drupal 8 and 7. We provide installation profiles that combined have thousands of content items, menu items, and configuration settings that make them very close to real-world Drupal 8 & 7 websites. Perfect material for benchmarking!