How to boost Laravel’s efficiency

Preamble

Why it’s important to improve the performance of Laravel apps

The way your Laravel app works is important if you want to get more users, keep the ones you already have, and grow your business. But there are many things that can slow down the performance of an application, such as bad code, bad server setups, and a lack of resources. Due to issues, your application may load slowly, contain errors, or crash. As a result, it’s critical to monitor its performance and make changes as necessary.

Speed is everything in the contemporary digital environment. When a website is unreliable or slow, users expect the content to load quickly and without interruption, and they will quickly become very irate. This is particularly true for e-commerce sites where users must be able to browse and buy products with ease. Users may look for alternatives if your application doesn’t load quickly enough to meet their needs. Because of this, you need to know how to use Laravel if you want to make fast, flexible websites.

Best practices for optimizing Laravel performance

How then can you enhance Laravel’s performance? Let’s look at some best practices, from straightforward actions like updating your PHP version to setting up tools to monitor the performance of your Laravel application and SQL database.

• Update Laravel and PHP to the most recent versions. Keep your PHP and Laravel versions up to date. While this can be more difficult with large legacy applications, using the latest versions gives you a number of benefits, such as new features, bug fixes, security patches, and optimizations that can improve the performance of your code. This may seem like an obvious first step, but keeping your PHP and Laravel versions up to date can help your application run faster.
  • To determine what version of PHP is installed: php -v
  • To check your current version of Laravel, run the following command from the root directory of your project: php artisan --version.
• With Laravel Debugbar, you can optimize and debug.
• Laravel Debugbar is a core package for Laravel and offers detailed information about your application’s execution time, memory usage, and database queries. Laravel Debugbar has a profiler enabled by default; this tool can help you identify which parts of your code are taking the longest to execute and direct your optimization efforts there.
• Utilize the command to install the Debugbar. composer require barryvdh/laravel-debugbar --dev
• The Debugbar will be enabled when APP_DEBUG is true.
• Set up Laravel’s default error handler.When you bootstrap a new project, Laravel automatically provides error and exception handling. You can customize error handling and the messages errors return, which can be particularly helpful for parts of your application that are mission critical or prone to issues. You should also make sure that you’ve configured log stacks on the backend to capture key events that precede the exception.
• Utilize Laravel Octane, if possible. By utilizing powerful application servers, Laravel Octane boosts the performance of applications. Octane boots your application only once and keeps it in memory, making it incredibly quick. It also makes use of a cache driver to boost read and write speeds.
• Make use of route caching. Laravel loads all the routes defined in an application when it starts up. You should cache routes in a production application with the command php artisan route:cache. Without caching, Laravel needs to parse all of the routes in your application and this takes longer when your application has a lot of routes. With caching, Laravel simply needs to refer to the file where cached routes are stored.
• Database caching is used. Laravel can simply return the cached version of a query rather than hitting the database, which can provide a huge performance boost, especially for high-traffic sites and APIs. You can cache popular database queries, reducing the load on your database, the server, and the client. It can also take some of the load off the database itself, which can further improve performance.
• Utilize the queues in Laravel.By offloading heavy tasks to a queue, you can free up resources on your web server and improve page load times. There are several ways to configure queues in Laravel, and the best approach will vary depending on your needs. First, make sure to configure your queues for concurrency. This will allow multiple workers to process items from the queue simultaneously, which can greatly improve performance. Second, monitor your queues carefully. This will help you identify any bottlenecks or issues that may be affecting performance. Finally, remember to gracefully restart your queues during your deployment process using php artisan queue:restart. Queues are long-lived processes and they won’t respond to changes in your application code without being restarted. To avoid having to restart manually, leverage a process manager like Supervisor to automatically restart queue workers.
• If you’re building a Laravel project. One of the first things you’ll do is use Composer to install dependencies, but Composer can also be used to manage your codebase. By keeping your project’s codebase in a separate directory from your dependencies, you can optimize Composer to improve performance. Use dependency injection. One of the reasons Laravel’s popularity is due to its use of dependency injection is that it can improve performance by decoupling code modules and allowing them to be injected into different parts of the application as needed. This improves code reusability and testability and helps reduce the overall complexity of your codebase.
• Monitor and optimize database transactions. Review your Laravel application for any raw queries using DB::raw as raw queries can result in SQL injection vulnerabilities. While Laravel includes Eloquent ORM and Query Builder, which make it easier to write queries, you’ll still need to watch for issues such as n+1 queries and lazy loading object relationships that aren’t being used in certain routes. And when you need to optimize large queries for speed, consider using Query Builder instead of Eloquent as Query Builder is both faster and uses less memory.
• Use rate limiting. Like all web applications, Laravel performance can be hampered by high traffic or malicious users. Rate limiting can be used to control the amount of traffic your application receives, helping to improve performance and protecting your application from denial-of-service attacks. When configuring rate limiting in Laravel, you must decide what kind of limit you want to impose, such as the total number of requests or the number of requests per second.
• The quickstart also includes predefined alert conditions across application golden signals (including transaction duration, error rate, and throughput). Set up baseline performance monitoring and proactive alerting. Proactively catching issues before they become major incidents.

Improve Laravel performance

Popular PHP framework Laravel is renowned for its effectiveness and adaptability. Even if you follow best practices and continuously improve your code, Laravel applications occasionally don’t perform as well as they should.

The key performance metrics in your application, such as HTTP request and response times, error rate, and throughput, are continuously provided in real-time by an APM tool. You automatically receive alerts for critical benchmarks in your application, such as when the total error rate rises too high, in addition to a prebuilt dashboard for key application metrics. You can find problems quickly and resolve them before they have an impact on your customers by using monitoring and alerts. You can improve the performance of your app even more by evaluating changes to your production code with APM metrics.

About Enteros

​​​​Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It finds the root causes of complex database scalability and performance problems that affect business across a growing number of cloud, RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.