Over the past few months my Weather Extension has grown to over 118,000+ users. Weather uses Laravel primarily as an api and VueJs to render the html. Speed is very important. Currently Weather is hosted on a $40 a month Digital Ocean server. Since Weather is free, I’ve tried my best to keep cost low. Here are a few changes I’ve made to improve the performance of my Laravel app.
- Use caching whenever possible. I cache user data, settings and locations. This limits the amount of sql queries. Just make sure you invalidate the cache when the data changes.
- Make sure you have good indexes for your database
- Cache your configs, routes and views. Add these commands to your Forge deploy script. Read more about config caching here
- php artisan config:clear
- php artisan route:cache
- php artisan view:clear
- Install/Setup PHP OPcache. OPcache will cache your php code so it doesn’t have to recompile. Check out this guide.
I would love to hear what you have done to improve speed and performance for your Laravel app. Please leave a comment below.
Originally published at Tim Leland.
