Laravel Optimization Playbook
Finding the real bottleneck in a Laravel application under load
Laravel is fast enough; applications are slow for a small number of repeatable, measurable reasons, and those should be found in a fixed order rather than by rewriting.
An application that got slower as it got busier does not need a new framework. It needs to be measured, then worked through in a fixed order: the query layer, then write contention, then cache invalidation, then queue saturation, then the runtime. This book runs that order with a measurement at every stage, and ends with the budgets and regression gates that stop the win from decaying the week after you ship it.
Written for: Laravel teams whose application slowed down as it succeeded.
No chapter is published yet. The full contents below is the finished outline; chapters go live as they are written, and none of them will sit behind a signup.
What it makes operable
Outcomes, not topic coverage.
- 01Profile before touching anything, and know which number you are moving
- 02Work the query layer, write contention and cache invalidation in that order
- 03Run queues, workers and Octane under load without introducing new failure modes
- 04Hold the gains with performance budgets and regression gates
Complete contents
12 chapters, in order.
Each chapter settles one decision, so it can be read on its own. Read in sequence to build the argument the book is making.
- 01In writing
Measure Before You Touch Anything
Profiles, traces, and a baseline that makes the next change arguable.
- 02In writing
The Query Layer: N+1, Indexes, and Eloquent Reality
What Eloquent actually emits, and the indexes it assumes you added.
- 03In writing
Reading at Scale: Pagination, Projections, Chunking
Cursor pagination, narrower selects, and not hydrating a million models.
- 04In writing
Writing at Scale: Transactions, Locks, Contention
Lock scope, deadlocks, and the hot row that serialises your whole workload.
- 05In writing
Cache Layers and Their Invalidation
Tags, TTLs and stampedes, with an explicit rule for what may go stale.
- 06In writing
Queues, Workers, and Horizon Under Load
Head-of-line blocking, retry storms, and backlog age as the alarm that matters.
- 07In writing
Octane and Long-Lived Processes
State that leaks between requests once the process stops dying.
- 08In writing
HTTP: Payloads, Compression, and the Edge
Response size, cache headers, and work you can stop doing entirely.
- 09In writing
Front-End Cost You Are Paying on the Server
Over-fetching components and the render work sitting behind them.
- 10In writing
The PHP Runtime: 8.3 to 8.5, OPcache, JIT
Runtime settings that move production numbers, and the ones that are folklore.
- 11In writing
Load Testing That Predicts Production
Representative mixes, warm caches, and a test whose result you can believe.
- 12In writing
Staying Fast: Budgets and Regression Gates
Performance budgets in CI, so the improvement survives the next quarter.
Evidence
What this book is arguing against.
Third-party sources behind the book's premise. Every figure in them belongs to the party that published it and is attributed to them in the text.
- What We Know About Laravel 13
Laravel News · 2026-02-20 · News · reported
Continue through the library
Adjacent operating manuals.
Rescuing Broken Software
Walking into a stalled delivery, the temptation is to form an opinion in the first hour and rebuild in the first week. Both are mistakes. This book runs the order that works: reconstruct the real state from the repository, the incident record and the deploy history; stabilise before improving; build a characterisation test net around the paths the business depends on; decide rewrite, refactor or replace with a defensible reason; and renegotiate the schedule before touching the architecture. It ends where a rescue should — with a team that can run the thing without you.
Read the full book
The Software Engineer's Career Handbook
Career advice written against the old ladder tells you to get faster at producing code, which is the part that stopped being scarce. This book is written against the shift instead: what is actually rare now, how to build comprehension and specification as deliberate skills, how to work with agents without losing the ability you would need without them, and how to choose problems, companies and forms of leverage that make judgement compound rather than depreciate.
Read the full book