Benchmarking in Laravel 12: Test Your Code Speed Easily

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Laravel 12 Performance Benchmark: Measure Your Code Speed

Benchmarking in Laravel 12 is a powerful way to measure how fast your code runs, helping you identify performance bottlenecks and optimize your application. With Laravel’s built-in benchmarking tools, testing and improving code speed has never been easier.

What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the process of measuring the time it takes for a particular piece of code or feature to execute. It helps developers understand the performance of different parts of their application, identify potential issues, and optimize for faster response times.

In Laravel 12, benchmarking is made simple and efficient with built-in tools that let you test and compare execution duration of your code snippets easily.

Advantages of Benchmarking

Benchmarking offers several benefits in Laravel development:

  • Improves application performance by identifying slow code or process heavy code.
  • Helps in optimizing database queries and operations.
  • Assists in comparing different coding approaches.
  • Provides measurable data for performance tuning.
  • Enhances user experience by reducing response time.
  • Facilitates better resource management.

Benchmarking a Single Code Block

The simplest way to benchmark in Laravel 12 is to measure the time a single function or closure takes to execute. Laravel provides a Benchmark class that can wrap a callable and return the execution time in milliseconds for that execution.

use Illuminate\Support\Benchmark;

$duration = Benchmark::measure(fn () => User::find(1));

// Output the time in milliseconds
dd($duration);

This example benchmarks the time it takes to fetch a user by it’s ID. The measure method executes the closure and returns the duration, letting you quickly see how how much time it takes.

This basic benchmark helps in pinpointing the speed of isolated code blocks.

Benchmarking Different Code Approaches

Laravel benchmarking helper allows comparing multiple closures or functions for comparison. You can pass an array of closures, and it will return the execution times for each function.

use Illuminate\Support\Benchmark;

$results = Benchmark::measure([
    'Find User 1' => fn () => User::find(1),
    'Find User 5' => fn () => User::find(5),
]);

dd($results);

The output of this execution will print time for both user’s data fetching process. It’s simplified queries version so it will not show much difference. But in real world scenarios, It can help to optimize process heavy queries.

Averaging Performance Over Several Iterations

Sometimes, working with local system where multiple services are running on same system. These benchmark data can be slightly miscalculated. To get a more reliable benchmark, Laravel allows running each function multiple times and averaging the results. This reduces noise from occasional fluctuations in execution time.

use Illuminate\Support\Benchmark;

$results = Benchmark::measure([
    'Find User 1' => fn () => User::find(1),
    'Find User 5' => fn () => User::find(5),
], 5); // Run each 5 times

dd($results);

In comparison of regular bench-marking without using average functionality, this approach provides more accurate results.

Averaging performance with more than few iterations is idle suggested real life implementation. This code will execute both queries 5 times and returns average response time of each query process.

Tracking Both Return Values and Performance

Laravel 12 also provides a way to get the actual result of the callback along with how long it took to execute.

use Illuminate\Support\Benchmark;

[$result, $duration] = Benchmark::value(fn () => User::find(1));

echo "Fetched user: " . $result->name;
echo "Execution time: {$duration} ms";

This is helpful when you want to benchmark code but also need to use the return value immediately afterward. It offers practical benchmarking without disrupting normal application flow.

Conclusion

Benchmarking in Laravel is an essential practice for any developer aiming to optimize and improve application performance. By measuring execution times and comparing different approaches, you gain valuable insights that help you write faster, more efficient code.

For a clear guide on monitoring your Laravel apps, read our blog Understanding Logging in Laravel Applications to learn setup, channels, and best practices.

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