Be part of JetBrains PHPverse 2026 on June 9 – a free online event bringing PHP devs worldwide together.

Demetrius's avatar

Laravel in the field

Hi everyone!

At the moment our company is on the verge of migrating from and old PHP system to a structured framework. After a lot of discussion, our final choice has become Laravel, bundled with Doctrine2 instead of Eloquent and Twig instead of Blade.

Symfony2 came in close on the second place, but the speed, community, resource availability and packages made us go for Laravel.

Laravel closely matches our demands and expectations for the system, however one question keeps bugging us. Are there any companies with applications of similar scale, that use the Laravel framework?

To give you an idea on the scale of our application:

  • Roughly 3 million active users
  • Around 240 database tables
  • Over 200 million database records and counting (60GB+)

How would Laravel handle such large application performance wise and what kind of problems might we run into? Please let us know.

Also, if you'd recommend something else, we're glad to hear that too.

Kind regards!

0 likes
3 replies
phildawson's avatar

Frameworks are frameworks imho - it's a whatever feels like the most natural and can solve the most problems you have. The speed and performance comes down to decent coding, database queries and caching. Then the servers, load balancing etc You could have a best framework in the world and write a shitty query in a loop which gets the same results every time and takes 20 seconds to load.

I'm always curious with http://stackshare.io/stacks#! to see what other companies use.

Shaun's avatar

Taylor has mentioned that there are a number of large scale sites out there running Laravel, but I don't believe he was at liberty to say which ones.

DirkZz's avatar

Last year at Laracon EU at a developer who has worked on a project for FoxSports NL explained how they had a api centric design with a Laravel application in the middle of all this. I have forgotten the exact numbers, but volume wise it was a huge application.

But "big" is kind of hard to define, it is more than the amount of records in your database. A 1GB database with tons of domain logic to me is also "big".

Personally I doubt that Laravel or any other decent framework like Symfony for example will be your bottleneck. Atleast in my situation it is always bloated views where tons of images or assets are loaded, slow database/queries or poor written code outside of the framework which migth cause some pages to perform poorly.

Please or to participate in this conversation.