Building Scalable APIs with Laravel and Octane

Laravel has always been developer-friendly, but with Laravel Octane, it's now blazingly fast. By keeping your application in memory between requests, Octane dramatically reduces response times and increases throughput.

What is Laravel Octane?

Octane supercharges your Laravel application by serving it using high-performance application servers like Swoole or RoadRunner. Instead of booting Laravel for every request, Octane boots it once and keeps it resident in memory.

Performance Gains

In my benchmarks, a typical Laravel API went from: - **~200 requests/second** (traditional PHP-FPM) - **~2000+ requests/second** (with Octane + Swoole)

That's a 10x improvement with minimal code changes!

Best Practices

1. Avoid Static State

Octane keeps your app in memory, so be careful with static properties:

// ❌ Bad - state persists between requests
class Counter {
  public static int $count = 0;

// ✅ Good - use request-scoped state class Counter { public function __construct(private int $count = 0) {} } ```

2. Use Concurrent Tasks

Leverage Octane's concurrency features for parallel operations:

[$users, $posts] = Octane::concurrently([
  fn() => User::all(),
  fn() => Post::all(),
]);

3. Warm Up Connections

Pre-warm database and Redis connections in your `octane:start` event listeners.

Octane is production-ready and powers many high-traffic Laravel applications today.