How To Optimize The Performance Of a Laravel Application

Since its first release in 2011, Laravel has grown multi-fold and now consider to be the best PHP framework in 2019. From complex APIs to simple web apps, Laravel can be a one-stop PHP development platform for your business. No PHP developer is untouched by Laravel these days.

Laravel is many things. But fast isn’t one of them. Let’s learn some tricks of the trade to make it go faster!

As your web application begins to grow in functionality and usage, the need to optimize its performance arises, so as to give your users a better experience when using your application.

In this article, I will be sharing with you a few ways and techniques to optimize your Laravel application.

1. Enhance ARTISAN Command Uses:

Laravel comes with a very useful and unique tool named Artisan command and this is very helpful to boost performance.

Routes caching will drastically decrease the amount of time it takes to register all of your application’s routes. To generate a route cache, we make use of the Artisan route:cache command:

This is very useful, especially when your Laravel developer is creating a lot of routes and configurations, and he just simply creates a cache as a plain array, and then Laravel becomes faster to load cache instead of loading the real object.

Make sure to re-run this command after you’ve changed the config or your routes file. If not, Laravel will not handle your changes because it already loaded from the cache.

Cache your configs, routes, and views. Use the below commands:

Install/Setup PHP OPcache. OPcache will cache your PHP code.

2. Remove Unused Service:

Sometimes, it is better that you don’t load all services in your config, and disable unused service inside the config file. Add a comment to the unused service provider in config/app.php. However, make sure after commenting, you don’t break the whole functionality of your app.

3. Minimize Use of Plugins Laravel Developer:

There are a wide variety of plugins for Laravel that allow you to easily add more functionality. With that increased functionality comes more libraries and files to load, which can slow you down. Make sure to take a look at which providers you are loading through your file onfig/app.php and cut down unnecessary ones.

Laravel uses Composer to manage its components, so cutting down your composer.json file will reduce the dependencies that are loading.

4. Profiling Your Queries:

You should install a profiler package to check what happens behind the scene when you execute a query on an Eloquent object.

You can choose https://github.com/loic-sharma/profiler or https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-debugbar, which integrates the generic PHP Debug Bar package. Once installed, they add a toolbar at the bottom of each render view, which shows the SQL queries that were have problems  on a given page and the amount of memory used by a request to your application.

This is often the best way to identify potential bottlenecks in your code when you work with smaller data sets in your local development database.

5. JIT Compiler for Laravel Development:

A middleman, like Zend Compiler, is used that interprets the PHP files and executes relevant C routines. Each time the application is executed, this process gets repeated, which makes the app slow. To avoid this, JIT (Just-In-Time) compilers, such as HHVM by Facebook are deployed to contribute towards performance.

6. Apply Eager loading:

A common problem when retrieving Eloquent relationships is the N + 1 query problem. As a Laravel web developer, you must understand the cost of every single query. As Laravel uses Eloquent ORM to handle the database, it follows “lazy loading”, and does not load any related data until referenced elsewhere in the code. With eager loading, Eloquent retrieves all related object models in response to the initial query.

7. Precompiling Assets:

Every Laravel applications come with Laravel Mix by default. Laravel Developers often keep separate files with distributed code to help easy and maintainable development, but during the production, efficiency is required. To gain this, a few of the commands can be used during deployment:

8. Database caching:

With caching backends like Redis and Memcached, We can also cache database results. Instead of having to retrieve the same set of results from the database over and over again, we could employ database caching, by first retrieving the records from the database and then caching it for later use.

CONCLUSION:

In this article, we have seen various ways and techniques that we can use to optimize the performance of a Laravel application. Implement these techniques in your applications to see massive performance improvements.

Please comment out if it helps to improve the performance of your Laravel application.

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