Adventures in increasing Laravel Performance

If you really want to maximize performance, one word... Varnish

PHP 7.x ?

Yeah php7 would make a huge difference too.. as would nginx vs apache

Agreed - my next steps are to switch to nginx, then PHP 7, then add varnish.

Any experience with HHVM and Laravel?

php7 is actually faster than HHVM in many cases. Especially php7 with opcode caching enabled.

Honestly I think once you get to the point of php7 with opcache, a good cache strategy for other content/variables/etc, nginx, maybe memcache, and varnish.. most anything else is usually diminished returns that aren't really worth the effort.

My personal website, even with the piggish overhead of Drupal, loads damn near instantly even when I'm authenticated and poking around the backend which cannot be cached by varnish. I am using APC for both opcode caching, and a key/value store cache backend, running nginx and have varnish in front of the whole stack. It is not yet running php7. But it's wicked fast.

@willvincent Thanks for the info on PHP 7. I am spinning up a new dev server to install it on and see how that behaves. Thanks.

Remember @kobear speeds in development vs. Production is totally two different things.

@jlrdw Yes, indeed. Just trying to measure orders of magnitude

@willvincent rereading your initial response, would you recommend memchache over redis?

@kobear Redis is more robust, and has considerably more features. To be honest I don't have hands on experience with both, and only limited experience with memcache. I tried to use memcache for my cache backend on my personal site and found it considerably slower than using APC as my key/value store. Your mileage may vary of course.

Also, I think redis scales (horizontally) better than memcache, but I'm not certain on that.

This seems to be a pretty good comparison, ultimately making the case that redis is (almost always) a better choice: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3063161/application-development/why-redis-beats-memcached-for-caching.html

@willvincent APC, Thank You! memcache is indeed slow. While it was fun writing things to keep track of whats inside the damm thing. Now to start reading.

It's worth looking at replacing varnish with nginx depending on what kind of content you're dishing up. See this article from the BBC tech blog for instance : http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/17d22fb8-cea2-49d5-be14-86e7a1dcde04

For me PJAX brought lightning fast website sensation. So I would add that to the list.

I noticed this: "6 items on the page having 38 SQL queries", did you use Eager Loading to minimize number of queries? https://laravel.com/docs/5.2/eloquent-relationships#eager-loading

@ohffs I use nginx behind varnish. :)

It is also possible, albeit highly unorthodox, to have nginx talk directly to a cache backend, memcache for sure, others probably.

Here's a several years old article I read back when it came out about doing just that.. they tout a 53,900% improvement in speed.

@alenn Yes. That is with eager loading everything I can. It is an activity feed page, and uses polymorphic relations for statuses, posts, images, and such. So I expect there to be alot of queries on that page.