Unlocking the Power of Laravel Octane: A Performance Boost for Your Applications
Laravel Octane is a game-changer for developers looking to supercharge their applications’ performance. By leveraging the power of Swoole and RoadRunner, Octane reduces the request/response time by caching an instance of a Laravel dependency container in RAM memory. In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of using Laravel Octane, its pros and cons, and provide a step-by-step guide on how to set it up.
What are Swoole and RoadRunner?
Swoole is a PHP extension that improves the performance of PHP by enabling low-level or traditional stateless models such as event loops and async. RoadRunner, on the other hand, is a high-performance PHP application server, load-balancer, and process manager written in Go. Both tools are designed to enhance the performance of PHP applications.
Why Use Laravel Octane?
Conventional Laravel apps are served from web servers like Apache, Nginx, and Lighttpd, which create a new PHP-FPM worker for every request. This approach causes an overhead for creating processes and booting Laravel apps on every request. Laravel Octane solves this problem by serving the first request to boot the framework (dependency containers) and subsequent requests from the bootstrapped version of the framework.
Pros of Using Laravel Octane
- Supercharges the performance of your Laravel apps
- Conserves resources compared to conventional Laravel apps
Challenges of Using Laravel Octane
- Code changes can be a challenge since Octane caches your app in memory
- Memory leaks can occur since the app is running in memory
Setting Up a Laravel Octane App
To get started with Laravel Octane, you’ll need to install RoadRunner or Swoole. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Install RoadRunner or Swoole using the following commands:
“`
// Install RoadRunner
composer require spiral/roadrunner
// Install Swoole
pecl install swoole
2. Start your app with the following command:
php artisan octane:start
“`
3. Navigate to your browser to see your app in action.
Benchmarking App Servers with AutoCannon
To evaluate the performance of each server, we’ll use AutoCannon, an HTTP benchmarking tool written in Node.js. We’ll run a benchmark for 10 seconds with 100 concurrent connections, 10 pipeline connections, and 3 worker threads to fire requests.
Results
According to our benchmark analysis, Nginx ran a total number of 64k requests, while Swoole and RoadRunner ran around 12k and 6k requests, respectively. While Nginx may seem like the clear winner, Swoole and RoadRunner offer better performance in certain scenarios.
Conclusion
Laravel Octane is a powerful tool for developers looking to improve the performance of their applications. While it has its challenges, the benefits of using Octane far outweigh the drawbacks. By following our step-by-step guide, you can unlock the power of Laravel Octane and take your applications to the next level.