Optimizing Laravel Performance: How to Use Octane with Laravel Vapor

Laravel Vapor is a serverless deployment platform for Laravel applications. It allows developers to deploy their Laravel applications to the cloud without having to worry about server management, scaling, or infrastructure.

Laravel Octane is a high-performance application server that's built specifically for Laravel. It can be used with Laravel Vapor, which is a serverless deployment platform for Laravel applications. Here are the steps to use Octane with Laravel Vapor:

1. Create a new Laravel Vapor project with laravel/vapor or update an existing one by adding the Octane dependency laravel/octane to your composer.json file. Here's an example:

    "require": {
        "php": "^7.4|^8.0",
        "laravel/vapor": "^3.0",
        "laravel/octane": "^1.0"
    },
   

2. Install the dependencies by running the composer update command.

3. Create an octane.php configuration file in the root directory of your Laravel application. This file will contain the Octane configuration options. Here's an example:

    <?php
   
    return [
        'serve_static' => true,
        'workers' => 4,
        'maximum_lifetime' => 0,
        'watch' => ['app', 'config', 'routes'],
        'persistent_connections' => true,
    ];
   

   This configuration will serve static files, use 4 workers, and enable persistent connections.

4. Update your serverless.yml file to include the Octane runtime. Here's an example:

    provider:
      name: aws
      runtime: provided.al2
      environment:
        APP_ENV: production
        APP_KEY: ${ssm:/vapor/app-key}
        APP_STORAGE: /tmp
        VIEW_COMPILED_PATH: /tmp
        SESSION_DRIVER: array
        LOG_CHANNEL: stderr
        VAPOR_ARTIFACT: ${vapor:artifact}
      layers:
        - ${vapor:php-74-fpm}
        - ${vapor:octane}
   

   This configuration will include the Octane runtime layer.

5. Deploy your application to Laravel Vapor using the vapor deploy command.

6. Test your application by accessing it through the Vapor-generated URL.

That's it! Your Laravel application is now running on Octane with Laravel Vapor. Octane will improve the performance and efficiency of your application, allowing it to handle more requests with fewer resources.

Benchmark

If we examine the performance metrics of a Vapor project deployed on the Amazon's us-west-1 region, we can observe some noteworthy statistics. In this particular instance, the Vapor application has been configured with 1024 MB of RAM and an RDS MySQL instance (db.t2.micro) with 1 VCPU and 1Gib RAM.

To further investigate the performance gains achieved by using Octane, let's consider an API endpoint that retrieves a user from the database. Remarkably, this endpoint exhibits a speed increase of 7 times and utilizes 44% less memory with Octane enabled.

# Before Vapor's Octane integration
Request Duration: 39.40 ms, Memory Used: 169 MB
Request Duration: 40.20 ms, Memory Used: 169 MB
Request Duration: 37.71 ms, Memory Used: 169 MB
Request Duration: 42.16 ms, Memory Used: 169 MB
Request Duration: 40.60 ms, Memory Used: 169 MB
Request Duration: 45.75 ms, Memory Used: 169 MB

# After Vapor's Octane integration
Request Duration: 6.78 ms, Memory Used: 112 MB
Request Duration: 6.64 ms, Memory Used: 112 MB
Request Duration: 6.67 ms, Memory Used: 112 MB
Request Duration: 6.38 ms, Memory Used: 112 MB
Request Duration: 6.75 ms, Memory Used: 112 MB
Request Duration: 6.47 ms, Memory Used: 112 MB

Moving on, we can now analyze the performance of a "login" route that renders a static template. By utilizing Octane, this particular endpoint showcases an impressive speed increase of almost 3 times and consumes 35% less memory compared to the standard approach.

Request Duration: 11.32 ms, Memory Used: 165 MB
Request Duration: 11.35 ms, Memory Used: 165 MB
Request Duration: 11.29 ms, Memory Used: 165 MB
Request Duration: 11.29 ms, Memory Used: 165 MB
Request Duration: 11.36 ms, Memory Used: 165 MB
Request Duration: 11.43 ms, Memory Used: 165 MB

# After Vapor's Octane integration
Request Duration: 4.89 ms, Memory Used: 108 MB 
Request Duration: 4.89 ms, Memory Used: 108 MB 
Request Duration: 4.83 ms, Memory Used: 108 MB 
Request Duration: 4.66 ms, Memory Used: 108 MB 
Request Duration: 4.79 ms, Memory Used: 108 MB 
Request Duration: 4.91 ms, Memory Used: 108 MB

By utilizing Octane, you'll notice a reduction in both request duration and memory usage. Moreover, as AWS employs 1ms billing granularity for Lambda, using this approach for your HTTP function will result in lower costs.