Is Laravel really this slow?

I just started using Laravel. I've barely written any code yet, but my pages are taking nearly a second to load!

This is a bit shocking to me when my framework-less apps and NodeJS apps take ~2ms. What's Laravel doing? This isn't normal behaviour is it? Does it need some fine-tuning?

Laravel is not actually that slow. 500-1000ms is absurd; I got it down to 20ms in debug mode.

The problem was Vagrant/VirtualBox + shared folders. I didn't realize they incurred such a performance hit. I guess because Laravel has so many dependencies (loads ~280 files) and each of those file reads is slow, it adds up really quick.

kreeves pointed me in the right direction, this blog post describes a new feature in Vagrant 1.5 that lets you rsync your files into the VM rather than using a shared folder.

There's no native rsync client on Windows, so you'll have to use cygwin. Install it, and make sure to check off Net/rsync. Add C:\cygwin64\bin to your paths. [Or you can install it on Win10/Bash]

Vagrant introduces the new feature. I'm using Puphet, so my Vagrantfile looks a bit funny. I had to tweak it to look like this:

  data['vm']['synced_folder'].each do |i, folder|
    if folder['source'] != '' && folder['target'] != '' && folder['id'] != ''
      config.vm.synced_folder "#{folder['source']}", "#{folder['target']}", 
        id: "#{folder['id']}", 
        type: "rsync",
        rsync__auto: "true",
        rsync__exclude: ".hg/"
    end
  end

Once you're all set up, try vagrant up. If everything goes smoothly your machine should boot up and it should copy all the files over. You'll need to run vagrant rsync-auto in a terminal to keep the files up to date. You'll pay a little bit in latency, but for 30x faster page loads, it's worth it!

If you're using PhpStorm, it's auto-upload feature works even better than rsync. PhpStorm creates a lot of temporary files which can trip up file watchers, but if you let it handle the uploads itself, it works nicely.

One more option is to use lsyncd. I've had great success using this on Ubuntu host -> FreeBSD guest. I haven't tried it on a Windows host yet.

To help you with your problem I found this blog which talks about making laravel production optimized. Most of what you need to do to make your app fast would now be in the hands of how efficient your code is, your network capacity, CDN, caching, database.

Now I will talk about the issue:

Laravel is slow out of the box. There are ways to optimize it. You also have the option of using caching in your code, improving your server machine, yadda yadda yadda. But in the end Laravel is still slow.

Laravel uses a lot of symfony libraries and as you can see in techempower's benchmarks, symfony ranks very low (last to say the least). You can even find the laravel benchmark to be almost at the bottom.

A lot of auto-loading is happening in the background, things you might not even need gets loaded. So technically because laravel is easy to use, it helps you build apps fast, it also makes it slow.

But I am not saying Laravel is bad, it is great, great at a lot of things. But if you expect a high surge of traffic you will need a lot more hardware just to handle the requests. It would cost you a lot more. But if you are filthy rich then you can achieve anything with Laravel. :D

The usual trade-off:

 Easy = Slow, Hard = Fast

I would consider C or Java to have a hard learning curve and a hard maintainability but it ranks very high in web frameworks.

Though not too related. I'm just trying to prove the point of easy = slow:

Ruby has a very good reputation in maintainability and the easiness to learn it but it is also considered to be the slowest among python and php as shown here.

Yes - Laravel IS really that slow. I built a POC app for this sake. Simple router, with a login form. I could only get 60 RPS with 10 concurrent connections on a $20 digital ocean server (few GB ram);

Setup:

2gb RAM
Php7.0
apache2.4
mysql 5.7
memcached server (for laravel session)

I ran optimizations, composer dump autoload etc, and it actually lowered the RPS to 43-ish.

The problem is the app responds in 200-400ms. I ran AB test from the local machine laravel was on (ie, not through web traffic); and I got only 112 RPS; with 200ms faster response time with an average of 300ms.

Comparatively, I tested my production PHP Native app running a few million requests a day on a AWS t2.medium (x3, load balanced). When I AB'd 25 concurrent connections from my local machine to that over web, through ELB, I got roughly 1200 RPS. Huge difference on a machine with load vs a laravel "login" page.

These are pages with Sessions (elasticache / memcached), Live DB lookups (cached queries via memcached), Assets pulled over CDNs, etc, etc, etc.

What I can tell, laravel sticks about 200-300ms load over things. Its fine for PHP Generated views, after all, that type of delay is tolerable on load. However, for PHP views that use Ajax/JS to handle small updates, it begins to feel sluggish.

I cant imagine what this system would look like with a multi tenant app while 200 bots crawl 100 pages each all at the same time.

Laravel is great for simple apps. Lumen is tolerable if you dont need to do anything fancy that would require middleware nonsense (IE, no multi tenant apps and custom domains, etc);

However, I never like starting with something that can bind and cause 300ms load for a "hello world" post.

If youre thinking "Who cares?"

.. Write a predictive search that relies on quick queries to respond to autocomplete suggestions across a few hundred thousand results. That 200-300ms lag will drive your users absolutely insane.

I found that biggest speed gain with Laravel 4 you can achieve choosing right session drivers;

Sessions "driver" file;

Requests per second:    188.07 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       26.586 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       5.317 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)


Session "driver" database;

Requests per second:    41.12 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       121.604 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       24.321 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Hope that helps

From my Hello World contest, Which one is Laravel? I think you can guess. I used docker container for the test and here is the results

To make http-response "Hello World":

• Golang with log handler stdout : 6000 rps
• SpringBoot with Log Handler stdout: 3600 rps
• Laravel 5 with off log :230 rps