Is Laravel really this slow?

Question

I just started using Laravel. I\'ve barely written any code yet, but my pages are taking nearly a second to load!

Answer 1

Yes - Laravel IS really that slow. I built a POC app for this sake. Simple router, with a login form. I could only get 60 RPS with 10 concurrent connections on a $20 digital ocean server (few GB ram);

Setup:

2gb RAM
Php7.0
apache2.4
mysql 5.7
memcached server (for laravel session)

I ran optimizations, composer dump autoload etc, and it actually lowered the RPS to 43-ish.

The problem is the app responds in 200-400ms. I ran AB test from the local machine laravel was on (ie, not through web traffic); and I got only 112 RPS; with 200ms faster response time with an average of 300ms.

Comparatively, I tested my production PHP Native app running a few million requests a day on a AWS t2.medium (x3, load balanced). When I AB'd 25 concurrent connections from my local machine to that over web, through ELB, I got roughly 1200 RPS. Huge difference on a machine with load vs a laravel "login" page.

These are pages with Sessions (elasticache / memcached), Live DB lookups (cached queries via memcached), Assets pulled over CDNs, etc, etc, etc.

What I can tell, laravel sticks about 200-300ms load over things. Its fine for PHP Generated views, after all, that type of delay is tolerable on load. However, for PHP views that use Ajax/JS to handle small updates, it begins to feel sluggish.

I cant imagine what this system would look like with a multi tenant app while 200 bots crawl 100 pages each all at the same time.

Laravel is great for simple apps. Lumen is tolerable if you dont need to do anything fancy that would require middleware nonsense (IE, no multi tenant apps and custom domains, etc);

However, I never like starting with something that can bind and cause 300ms load for a "hello world" post.

If youre thinking "Who cares?"

.. Write a predictive search that relies on quick queries to respond to autocomplete suggestions across a few hundred thousand results. That 200-300ms lag will drive your users absolutely insane.