Performance Optimization Tips for the Laravel Developer

Since its first release in 2011, Laravel has grown multi-fold and now it’s considered to be the best PHP framework of 2020. From complex APIs to straightforward web applications, Laravel can be a one-stop PHP advancement stage for your business. The arrangement of libraries and architecture that this framework provides, make it easy to build amazing sites using well-structured and beautiful code. In any case, to build such apps, your Laravel developer should know the tweak and tweets for utilizing the power of this framework and enhance performance as well.

Moving forward from our last blog where we discussed why Laravel is viewed as the best, presently in this one, we will talk about seven performance optimization tips for Laravel developer. Let’s see what we found after our research at ValueCoders.

1. Enhance Artisan Command Uses

Laravel comes with a valuable and special instrument named Artisan command and this is very helpful to boost performance. See our common setup here:

This is valuable, especially when your Laravel developer is making 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.

Be that as it may, remember to re-pursue this direction you've changed config or your routes file. On the off chance that you don't, Laravel won't deal with your changes because it already loaded from the cache.

Also, we cache user data, settings, and locations. This limits the number of SQL queries. Make sure you invalidate the cache when the data changes. Also, make sure you have good indexes for your database Cache your configs, routes, and views. Add these commands to your Forge deploy script.

Install/set up PHP OPcache. OPcache will cache your PHP code so it doesn’t need to recompile.

2. Remove Unused Service

At times, it is better that you don’t load all services in your config, and disable unused service inside the config file. Add a remark 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 expanded functionality comes more libraries and files to load, which can slow you down. Make sure to take take a look at which providers you are loading through your config/app.php file and cut down unnecessary ones. Moreover, 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

If you are curious about what happens behind the scene when you execute a query on an Eloquent object, you should install a profiler package. Once installed, they add a toolbar at the base of each rendered view, which shows the SQL queries that were issued 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. Apply “Eager Loading” to Your Data Laravel Developer

Laravel utilizes Eloquent ORM to easily map your object models to the database tables supporting it. With a couple of files you can map out your object structure, and Eloquent will handle all the appropriate database interaction needed for the CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) operations. When Eloquent does it, it uses a “lazy loading” approach.

That implies for any related data, such as the author details for a book, Eloquent won’t actually retrieve the data until it is specifically referenced elsewhere in the code. While it might appear to have one or two extra queries on your details page, making a similar query against a collection of books can result in a lot of queries and reduced performance as you wait for all of your data to return.

Rather, you need to set up your queries to use “eager loading,” which means they will retrieve any associated object models as part of your initial query. That way they are immediately available for use. You're typical…

A lazily loaded query becomes an…

...eagerly loaded query.

6. Precompile Assets

For advancement, having all of your assets in separate files (such as routes and configuration files) is useful for code maintenance. For production, this isn't important. To help with this, Laravel has a couple of artisan commands available that you can run before deploying your site:

These commands will compile your frequently used classes into a single file for brisk reference. They will likewise combine your configuration files and routes into single files for quicker stacking. You can likewise include your own classes into the optimization that might not be added by default. The performance increase will vary, but every little bit helps.

7. JIT Compiler

Computers can’t understand PHP locally. You can’t compile PHP to bytecode and have machines running it. That is the reason it is done through a go-between, similar to the Zend engine. As you would figure, this is slow. Each time your server runs a PHP file, it needs to change over it to tokens — done by the AST parser and interpret it. It, It, unfortunately, has to compile it every single time, even though it gets a similar outcome. For your application to act fast, you need to compile it once, run it every time method, and this is what a JIT compiler does.

The suggested JIT compiler for Laravel is HHVM, created and used extensively by Facebook. It’s also used by Wikipedia, Etsy, and a great many others. 

Hence, presently you realize how to improve your Laravel developer while developing a web app. However, to do this a vast technical knowledge is required from your end and sufficient measure of time also.