Benchmarks: Laravel

How fast is Laravel compared to other PHP frameworks? Benchmark results in requests-per-second (check methodology section to understand how they were conducted) prove it to be times slower than all others:

Framework	test/html	Faster	test/json	Faster
Lucinda	8449.55	+ 48.49 X	9243.01	+ 52.16 X
Symfony	1859.40	+ 10.67 X	2105.95	+ 11.88 X
CodeIgniter	1238.57	+ 7.11 X	1284.06	+ 7.25 X
Laravel	174.26		177.20

Why is it so unbelievably sluggish, over 10 times slower than its main competitor (Symfony)? The main culprit is over-programming and loads of logic inside that should only ran when required (as improvements by tweaks below demonstrate).

Tweak #1

One of the things that contributes to slowness is the fact that on every request, framework opens a session and saves a new file. This questionable decision makes framework twice slower but it can be easily corrected in app/http/Kernel.php by commenting following lines:

protected $middlewareGroups = [
    'web' => [
        \App\Http\Middleware\EncryptCookies::class,
        \Illuminate\Cookie\Middleware\AddQueuedCookiesToResponse::class,
        // \Illuminate\Session\Middleware\StartSession::class,
        // \Illuminate\Session\Middleware\AuthenticateSession::class,
        // \Illuminate\View\Middleware\ShareErrorsFromSession::class,
        // \App\Http\Middleware\VerifyCsrfToken::class,
        \Illuminate\Routing\Middleware\SubstituteBindings::class,
    ],
];

Once that is done, framework becomes twice faster, but still in desperate need of more tweaks. Results in requests per second:

Framework	HTML Rendering	JSON Rendering
Laravel (tweak #1)	386.37	376.34
Laravel (factory settings)	174.26	177.20

Tweak #2

Let us tweak laravel to the max and keep only services strictly required in MVC. This means emptying all middleware in app/http/Kernel.php so it becomes:

namespace App\Http;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Kernel as HttpKernel;

class Kernel extends HttpKernel
{
    protected $middleware = [];

    protected $middlewareGroups = [
        'web' => [],
        'api' => [],
    ];

    protected $routeMiddleware = [];
}

then modifying $providers and $aliases in config/app.php to become:

'providers' => [
    Illuminate\Encryption\EncryptionServiceProvider::class,
    Illuminate\Filesystem\FilesystemServiceProvider::class,
    Illuminate\Queue\QueueServiceProvider::class,
    Illuminate\View\ViewServiceProvider::class,
    App\Providers\RouteServiceProvider::class,
],
'aliases' => [],

Even with such drastic (unrealistic) changes, results only improve marginally:

Framework	HTML Rendering	JSON Rendering
Laravel (tweak #2)	443.73	443.16
Laravel (tweak #1)	386.37	376.34
Laravel (factory settings)	174.26	177.20

General Conclusion

Trying to optimize Laravel for performance is a job destined for failure. It seems its developers had zero performance concerns on their product: loads of logic is bundled for no reason and framework itself is massively over-programmed. All of these make Laravel incompatible with performance, so caching or related solutions will be your only viable options.

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