Laravel is a robust PHP framework that offers a great deal of flexibility and power. It is used by many companies to build their websites, applications, and APIs.
Laravel provides the most common tools such as routing and authentication, but it also comes with more advanced functionality such as middleware, ORM, and caching. The Laravel framework is one of the most popular PHP frameworks, and it is widely used by developers. It has a lot of features that make it easy to use and customize. However, the framework also comes with some downsides which cause performance issues.
The first thing you should do when starting with Laravel is to make sure your application is running at its highest possible performance. This will help you get the most out of your website or web application without having to spend too much time optimizing it. Laravel performance optimization steps are important because they will make your application faster and more stable which means users will have an easier time using your application.Â
In this tutorial, we’ll talk about how to optimize the performance of your Laravel application.
Top 5 Laravel Performance Optimization Tips
1. Leverage JIT Compiler
Laravel 5.7 has a brand new JIT compiler, which speeds up your application running on the server. The new JIT compiler can be disabled using the config/app.php file and will save you some precious time if you’re not using it.
To leverage the JIT Compiler, you will need to install the compiler package. You will do this in your composer.json file:
"require": { "laravel/framework": "5.*", "laravel/compiler": "5.*", }
The Laravel JIT compiler is the fastest way to write your application. The JIT compiler uses the full power of the PHP language to execute code almost instantly. This means that you can use more complex functions, objects, and libraries in your application.
The Laravel app is usually written in the PHP language. The PHP runtime is an interpreter that runs each script at compile time. This means that every query that is being executed needs to be read and interpreted before it can execute. This slows down the performance of the application by increasing its execution time.
The JIT compiler is a tool that can be used to perform optimizations on your Laravel application, which results in faster performance. It does so by compiling the code before it executes it, thus speeding up your application drastically.
The downside of this approach is that it’s very resource intensive. The more complex your code, the more resources it will consume. This can be a problem on mobile devices where many developers have limited resources to work with.
2. Classmap Optimization
Classmap optimization is a performance optimization technique that helps reduce the number of requests to your application. It involves re-categorizing classes, which reduces the number of times they are loaded by the application. This can allow you to reduce the overhead of loading classes by reducing their presence on your class map.
There are two types of class maps:
- Static Class Maps – This type of class map is used when you have a static set of classes that are used across all your routes. The static class maps are not updated when you change a route or add new routes.
- Dynamic Class Maps – Dynamic class maps update whenever they’re needed by the application (e.g., after an action has been performed on an object). Dynamic class maps help speed up requests because they reduce the time spent loading classes from disk and also reduce requests for their contents because it already exists in memory.
Classes in Laravel provide methods and properties that allow you to extend the functionality of your application. This is what makes Laravel so powerful, but it also means that each class in your application has the potential to be loaded by the application if they are used.
This is important because the more classes added to your application, the longer it takes for a page to load. In addition, each time a page loads, PHP will create a new instance of each class you have added. This can be very expensive if you have many classes in your application.
One way to reduce this cost is by taking advantage of the Eloquent ClassMap feature. If you look at your database structure in Laravel’s default app/config/database.php file, you will see that there are two tables: App\Model\Table and App\Model\TableStorage. These tables help organize all of your models by type (e.g., Model) and by storage type (e.g., Database).
If you are using a Classmap, you should look at how it is created. Laravel uses Reflection to create classes on the fly and that can cause some performance issues.
3. Use Caching
Caching is the process of storing data in an intermediary location, such as a database or file system. It allows you to reuse that data.
Caching is important for speed because it reduces the number of requests that must be made to the database when retrieving or storing data. When used correctly, caching can significantly improve the performance of your application.
Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks, and it’s very good at caching. Most of the time, you don’t have to worry about performance optimization as much as you do with other languages because Laravel does a lot for you. You just need to make sure that your application is configured correctly for caching and doesn’t try to do too much work on the front end.
For example, if your application is using a cache like Redis or Memcached, then you can set the key-value pairs in your routes and controllers like this:
Route::get('/foo', function () { return view('bar'); });
Controller::beforeFilter(function ($cookies) { return $cookies->cookie('foo'); });
4. Optimize Your Database Queries
One of the most important performance optimizations you can make is to optimize your database queries. Laravel applications use Eloquent ORM to query the database. The first step in optimizing your queries is to identify which queries are slow. You can do this by looking at your application’s log files, or by using a tool like Query Monitor.
Once you’ve identified which queries are slow, it’s time to optimize them. Here are some tips for improving performance:
Don’t use JOINs on large tables.Â
If you have an active record model with many relationships, you’ll want to avoid using JOINs on the related models because they may be slow. Instead, create a separate query that joins only the active records needed for each session and then runs that instead of loading all relationships into memory at once. This will help reduce database read operations during sessions by avoiding unnecessary joins over large tables that can be safely done in memory rather than on disk or in memory copies of many small tables (which is what happens during most JOINs).
Use prepared statements
Prepared statements are like SQL statements that have been created beforehand and stored in the query cache. When you execute prepared statements instead of making them from scratch every time, you will reduce the number of SQL queries executed by your application. This is especially important when using a large amount of data or when querying multiple tables in Laravel’s Eloquent ORM.
5. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
The next step in optimizing your Laravel application for performance is to use a CDN. A CDN is a cloud-based service that stores and distributes your website’s content on servers located locations across the world. The advantage of using a CDN is that it reduces latency between you and your users while speeding up page loads.
A CDN can significantly reduce load times by caching static assets like images, CSS and JavaScript. This means that when a user requests an image or stylesheet from your site, they will be served from the closest location possible. In addition, the CDN will try to distribute your static assets evenly across all available locations so they are cached at each location and loaded only once.
A CDN is a type of content delivery network that serves static files from a single location, rather than from your server. A CDN can help improve performance by loading assets from other locations and reducing the number of times assets are downloaded by your website.
This is particularly important for Laravel applications because many of the web assets used by Laravel apps are large and commonly require multiple requests to load. For example, Eloquent models can have hundreds or thousands of database queries or controller actions. This can lead to slow page loads and high latency if the assets aren’t loaded in parallel across multiple servers.
ConclusionÂ
I hope you like this little list of top Laravel performance optimization tips. Still, you should conduct a thorough analysis of Laravel’s performance and find out on your own what works and what doesn’t work for your app. This will help you prepare your list of tips and tricks that will eventually help you out in creating a great optimized application.Â
