Yes - Laravel is really very slow. For this, I created a POC application. Simple router with login form. I could only get 60 RPS with 10 parallel connections on a digital ocean server costing $ 20 (several GB RAM);
Setup:
2gb RAM Php7.0 apache2.4 mysql 5.7 memcached server (for laravel session)
I ran optimization, dump autoload linker, etc., and actually reduced RPS to 43 .
The problem is that the application responds in 200-400 ms. I checked the AB test from the local laravel machine was turned on (i.e. Not via web traffic); and I got only 112 RPS; with a response time of 200 ms with an average value of 300 ms.
Comparatively, I tested my PHP Native application to create several million requests per day on AWS t2.medium (x3, load balancing). When I AB'd 25 parallel connections from my local machine to this network, through ELB, I received approximately 1200 RPS. There is a huge difference on a machine with a load compared to the "login" page in laravel.
These are pages with sessions (elastic / memcached), real-time search queries (cached queries via memcached), assets extracted from CDN, etc. etc. etc.
What I can say, laravel sticks about 200-300ms load on things. This is great for PHP. Created views, after all, this type of delay is valid at boot time. However, for PHP views that use Ajax / JS to handle small updates, it starts to feel sluggish.
I can’t imagine how this system will look like using an application with several tenants, while 200 bots scan 100 pages each at the same time.
Laravel is great for simple applications. Lumen is tolerant if you do not need to do something that will require the meaninglessness of middleware (IE, not many applications for tenants and user domains, etc.);
However, I never wanted to start with something that can bind and cause a load of 300 ms for the message "hello world."
If you think, "Who cares?"
.. Write a predictive search that relies on quick queries to respond to auto-complete offers with hundreds of thousands of results. This lag of 200-300 m will lead you to madness.