9 posts tagged with "Performance Testing"

More than seven years ago, I shipped a Laravel API that passed every unit test, every feature test, and every browser test I threw at it. The staging environment ran fine. Code review was clean. I deployed on a Friday afternoon, and by Monday morning, the app was returning 502s under 200 concurrent users.

The database connection pool was exhausted. File-based sessions were creating lock contention. A queued job that ran fine in isolation was stacking up 4,000 pending jobs because the worker couldn't keep pace with incoming requests. None of these problems showed up in testing because I'd never tested with more than one user at a time.

The company's first answer was to hire an external firm to run the load tests. The results were useful, but they arrived as a report from people who didn't know our codebase, and we couldn't rerun them after every change. So we brought load testing in-house with tools like k6, and got familiar with them ourselves. That exposed the real cost: the tooling lived outside PHP, so every new engineer we hired had to learn a separate language and toolchain before they could write a single test. With VoltTest, a PHP team goes from zero to a working load test in about two hours at most, because there's nothing new to learn.

That experience is why I built VoltTest, and it's why I'm writing this guide. Laravel load testing isn't optional if you're running anything beyond a personal project. This guide covers why Laravel apps fail under load, how the available tools compare, and how to set up and run real load tests using PHP: no JavaScript, no Python, no context-switching.

PHP powers roughly 77% of all websites with a known server-side language — yet most PHP developers ship code without ever running a load test. The app works fine in development, handles a handful of users on staging, and then crumbles when real traffic arrives. Load testing catches that gap before your users do: it verifies that your application handles the traffic you actually expect, not just the traffic your laptop can produce.

This guide covers what load testing means for PHP, how to pick the right tool, how the main options compare, and how to write and run a real multi-step load test — on plain PHP or Laravel — in minutes.

We're opening up access to VoltTest Cloud — the managed platform for running large-scale load tests without provisioning a single server. Until now, cloud mode has been limited to a small group of early testers. Starting today, anyone can join the waitlist, and we're approving access in waves.

This post covers what VoltTest Cloud is, what you get in the closed beta, and exactly how the access process works from waitlist to your first cloud test run.

Choosing a PHP stress test tool usually means a painful trade-off: the popular load testing tools all live outside PHP, so you end up writing scenarios in JavaScript, Java, or XML instead of the language your app is built in. This guide takes a different approach. We'll cover what stress testing actually means for a PHP application, what to look for in a tool, how the main options compare, and how to run your first stress test on plain PHP or Laravel in just a few minutes — without leaving your Composer workflow.

With VoltTest 1.2.0, you can now run load tests directly inside PHPUnit — no external scripts or configuration required.

VoltTest was built to make load testing simple and native for PHP developers, and this new release takes it one step further. You can now test your Laravel APIs under load using the same PHPUnit environment you already use for your feature and unit tests.

When your Laravel app hits real traffic, will it fly… or will it fall over?

Most load-testing tools make you jump through hoops — learn a new scripting language, spin up external services, or fight with configs that feel like they belong to another ecosystem.

That’s why I built the Laravel Performance Testing package:
a native, PHP-first way to run load and stress tests right inside your Laravel project — powered by the VoltTest PHP SDK.

You write your tests in plain PHP, keep them version-controlled with your codebase, and run them with a single Artisan command. No context-switching. No external scripts. Just Laravel, PHP, and the performance insights you need before your users find the bottlenecks.

Performance testing is an essential process in software development that evaluates a system's responsiveness, stability, and scalability under different conditions. It helps identify bottlenecks and ensures applications meet performance expectations before deployment. There are several types of performance testing, each serving a different purpose. By understanding these types, you can choose the right tests to conduct based on your application's requirements. In this article, we will explore these types, their differences, and provide practical examples.

In this tutorial, we will explore how to perform stress testing on a Laravel application using the VoltTest PHP SDK. You will learn how to:

• Simulate multiple users interacting with your Laravel application.
• Test user registration and authentication workflows.
• Measure application performance under load.
• Extract dynamic values like CSRF tokens during test execution.
• Use a CSV file as a data source for testing.
• Analyze and optimize performance bottlenecks.

By the end of this guide, you will be able to confidently run automated performance tests to ensure your Laravel app is scalable and resilient.

Performance testing is crucial in modern application development, yet many developers skip it due to complex tools that don’t fit into PHP workflows. Today, I’m excited to introduce VoltTest PHP SDK, a powerful load testing tool with a PHP-native interface backed by Go’s exceptional performance capabilities.