Slow page load in Inertia (Laravel) despite not having any data on DB yet (freshly deployed app), how to find the bottleneck?

What’s the fastest way to isolate whether the delay is coming from TTFB vs frontend rendering?

Run Lighthouse from Chrome's dev tools.

How are you serving the app? Just to be sure: are you building the assets, and not using any development tool (npm run dev or php artisan serve) in production?

In Apache, have you:

• Enabled http2 or http3? This is pretty important.
• Enabled traffic compression (gzip)?

What's the size of the largest javascript bundle when you build the assets?

The first things I'd do is open the browser dev tools and check the console for any errors, the network tab for any glaring issues, and then run Lighthouse or equivalent. You can analyze the waterfall graph in the Network tab, but I'd check the other stuff first.

1. Confirm if it’s Laravel or the server

Create a simple test route:

Route::get('/ping', fn () => 'ok');

If /ping is also slow (~2s) → server / PHP issue If /ping is fast → Laravel / middleware / Inertia issue

2. If /ping is slow (most likely server-level)

Common causes I’ve seen in this exact scenario:

OPcache disabled → Laravel boot becomes very slow PHP-FPM misconfigured → requests queue even with low CPU Apache reverse DNS lookup → adds ~1–2s delay (HostnameLookups Off) No config caching

Run this (just to be sure)

php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:cache

Verify OPcache:

php -i | grep opcache

3. If /ping is fast (Laravel layer)

hen focus on hidden app overhead:

a. Middleware

Temporarily disable session/CSRF to test:

->withoutMiddleware([
    \Illuminate\Session\Middleware\StartSession::class,
]);

b. Inertia shared props (very common bottleneck)

Check HandleInertiaRequests:

public function share(Request $request)
{
    return [
        'auth.user' => fn () => $request->user(),
    ];
}

Even this can trigger unnecessary work per request.

Test by returning:

return [];

Top suspects:

1. OPcache not enabled
2. PHP-FPM worker bottleneck
3. Inertia shared props doing hidden work