If you're happy with Laravel’s traditional execution flow, that’s totally fine. But if you’re after more speed, more efficiency, and doing more with less resources, it’s time to meet Octane.
In this post, we’ll walk you through what Laravel Octane and its high-performance engine RoadRunner can do for your app — in plain, developer-friendly language.
Most Laravel developers are familiar with the traditional request lifecycle: every incoming request boots up the entire framework, reloads all service providers, re-reads config files, and does it all over again for every single user interaction. At some point, every page load starts feeling like a mini-apocalypse.
But does it have to be this way forever? Nope. That’s exactly where Laravel Octane comes in.
Octane throws out the “boot everything from scratch on every request” mindset. Instead, it keeps your application warm in memory and serves each request from a live, preloaded instance. Sounds good, right?
But Octane isn’t a superhero by itself. Without a real engine behind it, it’s just a cool idea. That’s where RoadRunner enters the picture.
What is RoadRunner?
RoadRunner is a high-performance application server for PHP, written in Go. It’s incredibly fast, and when combined with Laravel, it pushes your application into turbo mode.
Compared to running PHP through Apache or Nginx with PHP-FPM, RoadRunner uses less memory, delivers faster responses, and handles more concurrent requests.
In other words, if you’ve got RoadRunner, you can say goodbye to PHP-FPM for good.
Simply put: Laravel + Octane + RoadRunner = an app ready for takeoff.
What Do You Gain?
Speed: No more booting up Laravel from scratch on each request — big time savings.
Performance: Handle more requests per second without melting your server.
Concurrency: Don’t worry about async or queue strategies — Octane can launch parallel tasks out-of-the-box.
Session & Cache Optimization: With Octane, sessions and cache stay in memory, resulting in lightning-fast access.
Observability: RoadRunner brings built-in metrics and control panels to help you monitor your app in production with ease.
Are There Any Downsides?
Sure — like any powerful tool, Octane comes with caveats.
If your application heavily relies on CLI commands (like frequent artisan jobs or cron tasks), you’ll need to think through your architecture. Not all services and packages are Octane-ready. And since Octane keeps things alive between requests, stateful services may carry over data you didn’t intend to persist.
Some parts of your app need to be “reset” on every request — if you skip that, you might introduce weird bugs. So make sure your services are properly scoped and cleaned up.
When Should You Use It?
- When API performance is critical
- When building a high-traffic web application
- If you’re running lots of queue jobs or async tasks
- When you want to maximize server resource efficiency
- Or if every millisecond counts
Then Octane and RoadRunner are absolutely for you.
Laravel is already a powerful framework. But with Octane and RoadRunner, you can turn that power into a muscular beast.
Sure, setting it up might look intimidating at first. But once you get used to it, you’ll be asking yourself:
“How did I ever live without Octane?”
If performance matters to you, get to know Octane. Make peace with RoadRunner.
Laravel will take care of the rest.
