Modern web applications are expected to handle thousands of requests while maintaining low response times and predictable resource usage. For many Laravel applications, the traditional PHP-FPM request lifecycle can become a performance bottleneck as traffic increases.
Laravel Octane takes a different approach.
Instead of booting the Laravel framework for every request, Octane keeps your application running in memory and serves requests through high-performance application servers such as FrankenPHP, Swoole, or RoadRunner.
This can significantly reduce application boot time and improve throughput for suitable workloads.
In this guide, we'll explore how Laravel Octane works, how to use it with Laravel 13, what performance benefits it can provide, and the important issues you need to understand before deploying it to production.
What Is Laravel Octane?
Laravel Octane is Laravel's application server layer for running applications using long-lived PHP worker processes.
In a traditional Laravel deployment, a request generally follows this lifecycle:
Request
↓
Web Server
↓
PHP-FPM
↓
Boot Laravel
↓
Execute Application
↓
Response
↓
PHP Process Ends
With Octane, Laravel workers remain alive:
Request 1 ──┐
Request 2 ──┤
Request 3 ──┤──> Long-Lived Laravel Worker
Request 4 ──┤
Request 5 ──┘
The framework doesn't need to be completely bootstrapped from scratch for every request.
This makes Octane particularly interesting for applications where Laravel's startup overhead becomes significant.
Why Use Octane With Laravel 13?
Laravel applications can spend a measurable amount of time loading:
- Configuration
- Service providers
- Routes
- Composer dependencies
- Application services
- Middleware
- Framework components
With a traditional PHP-FPM setup, this work happens repeatedly.
Octane keeps workers alive between requests, allowing your application to reuse the already-booted framework.
Potential benefits include:
- Lower request latency
- Higher requests-per-second capacity
- Better CPU utilization
- Reduced framework boot overhead
- Improved performance for APIs
- Better performance for real-time applications
- More efficient long-running workloads
However, Octane is not a magic performance switch.
A poorly optimized database query will still be slow when running under Octane.
How Laravel Octane Works
Octane starts a number of long-running worker processes.
For example:
Load Balancer
│
┌──────────┼──────────┐
↓ ↓ ↓
Worker 1 Worker 2 Worker 3
│ │ │
Laravel Laravel Laravel
Each worker loads your Laravel application into memory.
Each worker loads your Laravel application into memory.
When another request arrives, the worker can reuse that application instead of rebuilding the entire framework environment.
This is one of the biggest differences between traditional PHP execution and a long-running application server.
Installing Laravel Octane
If you already have a Laravel application, install Octane using Composer:
composer require laravel/octane
Then run the Octane installation command:
php artisan octane:install
Laravel will ask which application server you want to use.
Depending on your environment, you can choose an appropriate server such as FrankenPHP, Swoole, or RoadRunner.
Starting Laravel Octane
Once Octane is configured, you can start the server with:
php artisan octane:start
For local development, you may want to specify the host and port:
php artisan octane:start --host=127.0.0.1 --port=8000
Your application can then be accessed through:
http://127.0.0.1:8000