How to Use Laravel Octane for Better Performance? (Features, Setup, Configuration, & Other Options)

Your Laravel application is running smoothly, but as user traffic spikes, you notice the telltale signs of strain. Like slower response times and rising server costs. This performance bottleneck is a critical business constraint, which can be solved by Laravel Octane.

Laravel Octane dramatically accelerates request throughput and reduces latency. So you can handle more traffic with fewer resources.

This blog focuses on what Octane is and how you can set up and use it for a more scalable technical infrastructure. So let’s begin with the basics.

What is Laravel Octane?

Laravel Octane is a high-performance application server for the Laravel framework. It supercharges the underlying request-response cycle to improve the performance and throughput of your application.

At its core, Octane uses a persistent engine, powered by either Swoole or RoadRunner. Unlike traditional Laravel setups, an Octane-powered application boots once and stays resident in memory. So it’s ready to handle incoming requests.

Traditional Laravel Requests vs Octane’s Persistent Workers

The fundamental difference lies in how they manage the application lifecycle for each request.

Traditional Laravel Request

1. A new HTTP request is received by the server.
2. The entire Laravel framework, along with your application code, is bootstrapped from scratch.
3. The request is handled, and a response is sent.
4. The entire application shuts down, freeing the memory. This “boot-and-teardown” process repeats for every single request. It’s reliable but computationally expensive.

Octane’s Persistent Workers

1. The Laravel application and framework are bootstrapped a single time when the Octane server starts.
2. This fully-booted application is then kept running in the background as a “worker.”
3. When a request arrives, it is simply routed to this already-running application instance.
4. The response is generated and sent, but the application remains loaded in memory, instantly ready for the next request.

In essence, Laravel Octane eliminates the bootstrapping overhead. It helps achieve significantly faster response times. Plus, the application can handle a much larger volume of concurrent users using the same hardware.

Key Features of Laravel Octane

Laravel Octane offers a suite of high-performance features designed for speed and scalability. Let’s discuss them in brief.

Octane Workers

Maintains multiple pre-booted Laravel instances in memory. This allows your application to process several requests simultaneously, drastically improving concurrency and handling more traffic.

Concurrent Tasks

Lets you execute multiple, unrelated tasks at the same time within a single request. This parallel processing can significantly reduce the time for operations that would normally have to run one after the other.

Octane Cache

Octane Cache provides a blazing-fast in-memory cache driver that utilizes the Octane server itself. Data is stored directly in RAM, offering read and write speeds far beyond traditional file or database-based cache systems.

Octane Tables

Allows you to create in-memory data structures that are shared across all workers. This is ideal for storing frequently accessed, volatile data like application state or real-time user counters, without any database overhead.

Ticks and Intervals

Enables you to execute code at specified intervals, similar to a cron job, but directly within the Octane server. This is perfect for performing recurring clean-up tasks or data aggregation without relying on external schedulers.

Zero Downtime Deployments

When deploying new code, Octane can gracefully restart its workers one by one. This ensures your application remains available to users throughout the entire deployment process, eliminating maintenance windows.

With these features of Laravel Octane, you can enhance speed, scalability, and performance for the applications. That is especially with high traffic or real-time features.

How to Install Laravel Octane?

To use Laravel Octane, make sure your application is running Laravel version 8.41 or higher. Refer to our guide on how to check the Laravel version to simplify things.

Install Octane via Composer:

Open your terminal in the Laravel project directory and run:

composer require laravel/octane

Run the Installation Command;

Once Octane is installed, you’ll need to configure it. Run the following command to start the installation process:

php artisan octane:install

This command will guide you through setting up Octane and choosing a server (either Swoole or RoadRunner). Each server has different strengths, which we’ll explore in the next section to help you decide the best fit for your needs.

Choosing Between Swoole and RoadRunner

During the installation of Laravel Octane, you’ll be prompted to choose between Swoole and RoadRunner. Each server has unique features that can impact how your application handles requests and manages resources, so choose based on your project’s requirements.

Swoole

• Swoole is a high-performance PHP server supporting native coroutines, async I/O, and WebSocket support.
• Ideal for applications that require asynchronous tasks, like WebSocket-based applications or I/O-intensive processes.

RoadRunner

• RoadRunner is a powerful, PHP application server written in Go, which also provides persistent workers.
• Great for handling HTTP requests and is generally easier to install on most systems than Swoole.

What to Choose?

• Choose Swoole for applications needing asynchronous processing, WebSockets, or advanced concurrency.
• Choose RoadRunner for general-purpose applications focused on efficient HTTP request handling.

Once you’ve selected a server, you can proceed to configure and run Laravel Octane.

How to Configure and Run Laravel Octane?

Configuring and running Laravel Octane is a straightforward process. Here is a step-by-step guide to get you started.

Step 1: Installation: Begin by installing the package into your Laravel project via Composer.

composer require laravel/octane

Step 2: Configuration: Publish Octane’s configuration file to customize your server settings.

php artisan octane:install

This creates a config/octane.php file. In that, you can specify your server (Swoole or RoadRunner), worker count, and other performance-related settings.

Step 3: Starting the Server: You can start the Octane server using the following Artisan command.

php artisan octane:start

This command boots the server with your chosen driver. Your application is now being served by Octane, typically accessible at http://localhost:8000.

Step 4: For Production: In a production environment, you should use a process manager to ensure Octane runs continuously.

# Start the server in a production-optimized mode
php artisan octane:start --server=swoole --workers=4 --task-workers=8

It is crucial to use a process manager like Supervisor to monitor the Octane process and automatically restart it if it fails. A basic Supervisor configuration file would specify this command to keep the application running.

Step 5: Deployment & Reloading: Unlike a traditional setup, code changes are not reflected immediately. After a deployment, you must ask Octane to reload its workers gracefully without downtime.

php artisan octane:reload

This ensures all workers are refreshed with the new code, maintaining a smooth user experience. Implementing Laravel performance optimization techniques further enhances speed, scalability, and overall system responsiveness.And if you want help with the implementation for your application, get our Laravel development services.

Octane Features to Consider for Enhanced Performance

Laravel Octane provides several built-in optimizations to improve your app’s responsiveness and scalability. Let’s explore some key optimizations.

Worker Reloading

When a request is processed, Laravel Octane does not automatically reset the application state between requests. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that no state is carried over inadvertently from one request to the next.

Set automatic reloading to enable Octane to reset state:

'octane' => [

    'max_requests' => 500, // Reload workers after 500 requests

],

Setting this option ensures that the state remains fresh and helps prevent memory leaks or unwanted state persistence.

Task Workers

Octane allows you to offload time-consuming tasks to background workers. This improves response time for users as these tasks run asynchronously.

Example:

Octane::concurrently([

    fn () => $this->performTaskOne(),

    fn () => $this->performTaskTwo(),

]);

This allows multiple tasks to run in parallel, reducing the time spent waiting for each to complete and making your application more responsive.

Octane Cache

Octane provides a built-in cache layer that you can use to store values in memory, perfect for values that are expensive to calculate or retrieve frequently:

Octane::cache()->put('key', 'value', 600); // Cache for 10 minutes

$value = Octane::cache()->get('key');

Using this cache significantly reduces load times for frequent data retrieval and enhances your application’s overall performance. Implementing Laravel caching allows efficient data storage and retrieval, optimizing speed and resource usage across your application.

Benchmarking and Monitoring Performance

After configuring Octane, it’s essential to benchmark your application and monitor it under load.

Use Apache Benchmarking Tool:

Run load tests with Apache Bench (ab) to see improvements in request handling:

ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://127.0.0.1:8000/

This command will send 1,000 requests with a concurrency of 100, allowing you to measure how Octane handles high traffic.

Using Blackfire.io or NewRelic:

Tools like Blackfire and NewRelic are excellent for measuring performance. These tools help identify bottlenecks in your code, allowing you to further optimize your application. For managing concurrency and ensuring consistent task execution, you can also implement atomic locks in laravel.

Common Use Cases and Best Practices for Laravel Octane

Laravel Octane is well-suited to specific types of applications and use cases. Here are some scenarios and best practices to maximize its potential.

Common Use Cases:

• High-Traffic Applications: For applications with high request rates, such as news websites or e-commerce platforms.
• WebSocket Applications: Apps that require WebSocket, like real-time dashboards or chat applications.
• API Services: For Laravel RESTful APIs that need to serve large numbers of requests with low latency.

Best Practices

• Avoid Stateful Services: Since Laravel Octane is a persistent application, avoid storing request-specific state in global variables or service providers.
• Database Connections: Ensure your database connections are correctly configured to support long-running processes.
• Cache and Sessions: Use Octane’s cache or store sessions externally in Redis or Memcached to prevent issues with state persistence. To further improve database efficiency, consider using the laravel n+1 query detector to identify and eliminate redundant queries.

Scaling With Laravel Octane

Laravel Octane optimizes a single server’s performance. But true scalability often requires architectural strategies. Here are key approaches to handle growing traffic.

Horizontal Scaling

This involves running multiple copies, or instances, of your entire application behind a load balancer. Vertical scaling makes one server more powerful. But horizontal scaling lets you distribute incoming traffic across several smaller servers.

This method increases fault tolerance; if one instance fails, others can continue to handle requests.

Load Balancing

A load balancer is the traffic cop for horizontal scaling. It sits in front of your application instances and distributes incoming requests evenly among them. This can be implemented using services like AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Nginx, or HAProxy.

It ensures no single server becomes a bottleneck and is essential for achieving high availability.

Laravel Vapor

Laravel Vapor is a serverless deployment platform powered by AWS Lambda. It automatically scales your application on a per-request basis. There are no servers to manage; Vapor instantly launches as many copies of your application as needed.

It can handle traffic spikes, and scales down to zero when idle, which can be highly cost-effective for variable workloads.

Let’s Summarize

Laravel Octane is a transformative tool for any application facing performance constraints. Traditional Laravel reboots your entire application for every single visitor. Octane keeps it running and ready, so it can serve visitors immediately.

Octane leverages a persistent architecture and delivers immediate, tangible benefits. Like drastically reduced latency, superior request handling, and more efficient resource utilization.So, do you want a high-performance Laravel application powered by Octane and other advanced integrations? Then hire expert Laravel developers with us today!

FAQs on Laravel Octane

Mayur Upadhyay

Leading digital transformation projects with precision and creativity, Mayur turns complex ideas into results-driven web solutions. As Project Leader at WPWeb Infotech, he leverages his expertise in Laravel, PHP, Shopify, and Drupal to deliver innovation, scalability, and long-term success.