Debugging Real-World Production Nightmares

Checkout throws 500 errors in production but works perfectly locally. We'll trace the issue to improper env() usage with config caching and learn why environment differences kill deployments.

The admin orders page gets slower until it times out. We'll use Debugbar to expose hidden N+1 queries in Blade templates and fix them with strategic eager loading.

A regular user triggers an admin-only refund and money disappears. We'll audit routes, discover missing middleware, and implement proper policy checks.

Two customers buy the last item... and both orders succeeded. We'll reproduce the race condition with concurrent requests and fix it with database locks and atomic operations.

Users occasionally see someone else's cart totals. We'll trace the bug to unscoped cache keys and learn when personalized data should never be cached.

Receipt generation works for 50 orders, then the worker crashes. We'll profile memory growth, identify Eloquent accumulation in loops, and implement chunking with proper cleanup.

International customers report orders showing wrong dates: "I ordered yesterday but it says tomorrow." We'll untangle mixed timezone assumptions and establish the "store UTC, display local" principle.

The site returns 500 errors because the disk is full—laravel.log is 47GB. We'll identify runaway debug logging, implement rotation, and establish safe logging practices.

We watched a simple search like WHERE name LIKE '%query%' turn into a full table scan and lock the database, so we need to tighten up how we handle searches. We'll reject tiny queries, add a limit and paginate() to cap what we pull and then speed things up with Cache::remember() using a key that includes the search and request()->input('page').

Order totals don't match line items. We'll expose rounding errors, and rebuild calculations consistently using a custom "value type" object.