Scaling Laravel Applications – Strategies and Best Practices

Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks used for building web applications. Its expressive syntax, elegant code organization, and robust features have made it the framework of choice for many developers.

However, as your Laravel application grows and takes on more users and traffic, you need to think about scaling it to handle increased loads. An unscalable application will be slow, prone to crashes, and poor user experience.

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore various strategies and best practices for scaling a Laravel application. We will cover database, server, caching, asynchronous processing, optimization, and other scaling techniques.

Hire Laravel developers from a trusted IT company who know how to follow these tips, and you will be able to scale your app easily to millions of users.

Use Database Scaling Techniques

The database choice of your Laravel app can easily become a performance bottleneck as the application usage grows. The main database scaling techniques you should leverage are:

1. Database Horizontal Scaling

Horizontal scaling means distributing the database load across multiple database servers. Based on load, you can add more database servers to handle increasing read/write requirements.

Laravel makes horizontal scaling easy via database replication and load balancing. Set up a master-slave topology where writes go to master and reads are spread across multiple slaves.

You can also explore sharding, which involves partitioning data across multiple database servers.

2. Use NoSQL Databases

Relational databases like MySQL can take a lot of work to scale horizontally. NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Cassandra are designed to scale out on demand.

Consider NoSQL databases for very large datasets having flexible queries. Changing databases in Laravel is easy, so you can quickly adopt NoSQL.

3. Add Read Replicas

Adding read replicas redirects read queries away from the main database server. They improve read performance and reduce the load on the main database.

Laravel allows transparently reading from read replicas. Scaling reads via replicas takes no code changes.

4. Use Caching

Database caching mechanisms like Redis and Memcached can drastically reduce database trips. Frequently accessed data can be stored in caching layers close to the application.

Laravel has excellent integration with Redis, letting you cache database calls and reusing cached data instead of hitting the database each time.

Optimize Your Laravel Code

Before infrastructure scaling, it is important to first optimize Laravel code by following coding best practices, eliminating expensive queries, leveraging asynchronous processing, and caching frequently accessed data. Here are the best practices to strengthen your Laravel codebase.

1. Follow Coding Best Practices

Follow PHP and Laravel coding standards, enable OPcache for faster PHP execution, and use your code to detect issues. Profile scripts to detect slow code paths.

Optimized and clean code squeezes most performance before needing expensive infrastructure.

2. Limit N+1 Problems

Fix N+1 query problems where inefficient code causes thousands of extra database queries. Leverage eager loading, lazy loading, and query optimizations.

3. Paginate Large Result sets

Paginate queries return thousands of rows instead of loading all records at once. Pagination allows fast responses when browsing large amounts of data.

Laravel makes efficient pagination quite simple. Paginate model results before returning them to the user.

4. Use Asynchronous Processing

Expensive tasks like reporting, imports, exports, etc, should use asynchronous queuing to receive and process the jobs in the background.

Laravel Horizon provides excellent queued job infrastructure. Use Redis for job queuing and Horizon for management.

5. Cache Frequently Accessed Data

Leverage caching mechanisms like Memcached and Redis to reduce database load. Cache from runtime data to computed query results. Laravel makes caching painless.

These coding best practices ensure your app squeezes most performance from the current infrastructure.

Scale Your Laravel Servers

Scale out the application servers horizontally, implement reverse proxy caches, break monolith structure into independently scaling microservices, and leverage CDNs for static assets.

1. Horizontal Scaling

Launch Laravel code on multiple front-end servers behind a load balancer. Keep adding more app servers vertically to handle increasing user loads.

Laravel deployments are stateless, facilitating easy horizontal scaling. Load balancers like Amazon ELB easily scale requests.

2. Use a Reverse Proxy

A reverse proxy server like Varnish improves performance and resource use before requests hit PHP.

Varnish caches full pages and API responses, reducing app server loads drastically. Integrates well with Laravel apps.

3. Distribute Your Application

Break your monolith app into multiple smaller services like Orders, Customers, etc, having their app servers. Microservices aid scaling by splitting business functions across services.

Laravel is perfect for building independent but integrated microservices. Based on load, you can then scale specific services.

4. Server Scaling

Beef up your server hardware with more cores, memory, storage, and bandwidth as traffic scales up. Faster processors and SSD disks improve response speed considerably.

Cloud servers let you upgrade hardware instantly as per demand.

5. Use a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) reduces load from assets like images JavaScript by caching them at the network edge. Resources get served from CDN instead of app/database servers.

CDNs improve page load times. Laravel integrates well with cloud CDNs.

Implement Application Caching

Additional performance gains come from widespread caching – full page caches, API response caches, and CDNs reduce database trips and app server loads.

1. Cache Full Pages

Varnish and Nginx provide full-page caching for anonymous page requests. The entire page output gets cached, reducing app requests drastically.

2. Cache API Responses

Instead of running database queries upon every API call, cache the API responses. Memcached is perfect for fast API data caching.

3. Cache Complicated Processing

Expensive processing should go into the cache instead of running processing logic in each request. E.g., recommendation algorithms, sorting logic, etc.

4. Use CDN For Assets

Store CSS JavaScript libraries in CDN instead of the app server. The assets get cached across the globe, improving page load speeds.

Laravel integration with CDNs is seamless, speeding up sites drastically.

Master Capacity Planning and Auto Scaling

Even with extensive optimization and scaling, your application may experience unexpected surges in traffic that overwhelm capacity. Capacity planning and auto-scaling techniques help manage such scenarios:

1. Monitor Load Metrics

Watch server metrics like CPU usage, memory usage, database connections, I/O waits, etc., closely to detect rising demand trends.

Tools like NewRelic provide deep visibility into server utilization schedules.

2. Vertical Scaling

Based on rising usage trends, you can vertically scale up your servers by adding more cores, memory, and storage to handle bigger loads.

Cloud servers let you upgrade hardware instantly as the user base expands.

3. Auto Scaling Policies

Define auto-scaling policies in your cloud account to automatically add or remove servers based on server utilization. Removes manual guesswork.

For example, add 2 more app servers if CPU usage is> 90% for 5 minutes. This ensures capacity meets demand.

4. Stress Testing

Use load testing tools for stress testing your infrastructure with simulated traffic. Fix bottlenecks before they cause outages on the live site. Laravel and infrastructure perform best under stress tests.

Conclusion

Scaling a busy portal like Laravel requires tapping different techniques: code optimization, database enhancements, server scaling, caching layers, and auto-scaling. Leverage the IT strategy and consulting services of a professional IT company to push infrastructure to millions of users.

With cloud infrastructure, most of the heavy lifting is taken care of. Focus on clean, modular code and caching to extract maximum performance. Adopt an agile approach by stress testing and monitoring usage closely. Capacity can then keep pace with sudden viral popularity.

Use this guide to make your Laravel application infrastructure capable of serving high volumes with speed and resilience. Scale your app without issues as millions of users start accessing it!