Certainly! Slow local performance in Laravel (especially on Windows) is a common pain point, and it can be due to several factors. Here’s a step-by-step approach to diagnose and improve your local app’s response time:
1. Profiling with Laravel Telescope
Install Laravel Telescope to get a more granular view of what’s happening during the request lifecycle:
composer require laravel/telescope --dev
php artisan telescope:install
php artisan migrate
php artisan telescope:publish
Visit /telescope and inspect the timeline for each request. This will help you see which service providers, middleware, or listeners are taking the most time.
2. Debugging Service Providers and Booting
Since most time is spent in "Application" and "Booting", try profiling your service providers:
- Temporarily comment out custom or third-party service providers in
config/app.phpand see if performance improves. - If you identify a culprit, dig into its boot method for heavy operations.
3. Middleware Profiling
Since you suspect middleware (especially with tenancyforlaravel), try disabling them temporarily:
- Comment out middleware in
app/Http/Kernel.phpand test. - If you see a big improvement, re-enable them one by one to isolate the slow one.
You can also log middleware execution time:
// In a middleware handle() method
$start = microtime(true);
$response = $next($request);
\Log::info('Middleware X took: ' . (microtime(true) - $start) . ' seconds');
return $response;
4. Windows Filesystem Performance
Windows is notoriously slow with many file operations (autoloading, config caching, etc). Try these:
- Enable Opcache in your PHP config.
- Use WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for your dev environment if possible. Performance is much closer to production Linux.
- Check for antivirus interference: Exclude your project directory from Windows Defender or any antivirus.
5. Optimize Laravel Caches
Run these commands to optimize your app:
php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:cache
composer dump-autoload -o
6. Check Composer Dependencies
Large or unnecessary dependencies can slow down bootstrapping. Run:
composer install --optimize-autoloader --no-dev
7. Tenancyforlaravel Specifics
If you’re using tenancyforlaravel:
- Make sure you’re not running expensive tenant resolution logic on every request.
- Profile the package’s middleware and listeners as above.
8. Xdebug
If you have Xdebug enabled, it can slow things down considerably. Disable it unless you’re actively debugging.
9. Hardware and Herd Pro
- Ensure Herd Pro is using the latest PHP version.
- Try increasing the allocated resources (CPU, RAM) for Herd Pro.
10. Final Step: Compare with Production
If you have SSH access to production, run php artisan profile:requests (with spatie/laravel-ray) to compare timings.
Summary:
- Use Telescope for profiling.
- Isolate slow service providers/middleware.
- Optimize caches.
- Consider WSL2 for better filesystem performance.
- Profile any custom or package code that runs on every request.
Let me know if you need help with any of these steps or want to share more specific Telescope or Debugbar output!