Is your Laravel application frequently encountering performance-related challenges? Are you struggling to handle unpredictable user traffic, which leads to periods of downtime? Is your application overprovisioned with resources, causing a rise in your operational expenses? 

If your response to the previous questions aligns with a “yes,” it’s a clear signal that the time has come to initiate the scaling process for your Laravel application.

We at Mallow have over a decade in the industry of custom software development, have successfully partnered with clients from various business domains. Our scalable solutions have not only earned us continued trust with our clients but have also played a pivotal role in building applications that are optimally scalable and cost-effective in terms of overall resource consumption, resulting in taking their business to the peak of success.

After going through this article, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of how to scale your Laravel applications effectively. This knowledge encompasses a deep insight into the scaling process itself, including the importance of each step and the underlying reasons behind their significance.

This stage in the application development process focuses on fine-tuning and maintaining the application to ensure it performs at its best throughout its lifecycle, to identify bottlenecks and performance issues through monitoring and profiling tools. You need to implement optimisations, which may include code refactoring, database indexing, or server resource allocation adjustments, to address these issues and enhance overall performance. This stage encompasses ongoing monitoring and management of the application in a production environment. This involves tracking application metrics, analyzing user behavior, and addressing any emerging issues promptly. 

Before starting to scale your Laravel application, it’s imperative to conduct a thorough performance analysis and set up robust monitoring. Performance analysis involves identifying bottlenecks and areas that need improvement. 

Utilise APM tools like New Relic to track performance metrics such as response time, database queries, and resource usage. Regularly review these metrics to spot anomalies and areas of concern. This data-driven approach lets you decide where to focus your optimisation efforts as you scale.

Leverage insights gained from performance analysis and monitoring like most time-consuming queries and frequently called queries and improve them.

Make use of built in performance monitoring options for finding slow query logs and full table scan queries and improve them. Also, you can make use of database services like RDS’s performance insights if you are using RDS.

Examining the database schema and queries in your Laravel application

Ensure appropriate indexing of columns frequently used in queries to enhance data retrieval speed.

Consider normalising the database schema to reduce data redundancy and enhance data integrity, leading to efficient storage and query operations.

Minimise unnecessary joins in SQL queries and implement caching mechanisms for improved performance.

Select necessary columns instead of selecting all the columns

Efficient session management is vital for both security and scalability in Laravel applications. By default, Laravel uses file-based sessions, but as your application scales, you might consider using alternative session drivers such as Redis. These drivers are more suitable for distributed environments and offer better performance. Also, consider using stateless authentication mechanisms like JWT (JSON Web Tokens) to reduce the burden on server-side session management. 

The complete article was originally published at Strategies and steps to scale my Laravel application