What is Laravel Octane?

Laravel Octane boots a Laravel application once and keeps it resident in memory using a high-performance server such as Swoole or FrankenPHP, serving requests without rebooting the framework each time. The result is typically several times more throughput and much lower latency.

Read in RomanianLaravel Octane

Why it matters

Traditional PHP boots the whole framework on every single request, then throws it away. Octane boots once and keeps the application warm, so each request skips the expensive startup. For a busy app that can mean serving far more traffic on the same hardware, and noticeably faster responses for users.

When it is worth it

Octane shines for high-traffic APIs and apps where response time matters. It asks for more discipline in return: because the application stays in memory between requests, state that used to reset every request now persists, so leaks and shared-state bugs need real care.

We have shipped this

We migrated a production analytics platform to Octane and measured the throughput and latency gains end to end. The write-up is in our Waydev case study.

Related terms

Used in

Waydev: lifting throughput and unifying notifications at a YC engineering-analytics startup (11 months)Eleven months at a YC W21 startup. Migrated Laravel + Vue to Octane and shipped a notification microservice covering Slack, Teams, email, and in-app, without breaking the live product.

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