Laravel Octane is an official package for the Laravel framework that dramatically boosts application performance by running Laravel on high-performance application servers like Swoole or RoadRunner.

⚡ What Makes Laravel Octane Special?

Instead of reloading the Laravel framework on every HTTP request (as with traditional PHP-FPM setups), Octane keeps the application in memory, avoiding repeated bootstrapping. This makes your Laravel app much faster.

🔧 How Does It Work?

Laravel Octane uses persistent worker servers (e.g., Swoole or RoadRunner), which:

1. Bootstrap the Laravel application once,

2. Then handle incoming requests repeatedly without restarting the framework.

🚀 Benefits of Laravel Octane

RoadRunner is a high-performance PHP application server developed by Spiral Scout. It serves as a replacement for traditional PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) and offers a major performance boost by keeping your PHP application running persistently — especially useful with frameworks like Laravel or Symfony.

🚀 What Makes RoadRunner Special?

✅ Worker-Based Performance

• PHP scripts are not reloaded on every request. Instead, they run continuously in persistent worker processes (similar to Node.js or Swoole).

• This eliminates the need to re-bootstrap the framework on every request — resulting in significantly faster response times than with PHP-FPM.

✅ Built with Go

• RoadRunner is written in the programming language Go, which provides high concurrency, easy deployment, and great stability.

✅ Features

• Native HTTP server (with HTTPS, Gzip, CORS, etc.)

• PSR-7 and PSR-15 middleware support

• Supports:

  • Queues (e.g., Redis, RabbitMQ)

  • gRPC

  • WebSockets

  • Static file serving

  • Prometheus metrics

  • RPC between Go and PHP

• Hot reload support with a watch plugin

⚙️ How Does It Work?

1. RoadRunner starts PHP worker processes.

2. These workers load your full framework bootstrap once.

3. Incoming HTTP or gRPC requests are forwarded to the PHP workers.

4. The response is returned through the Go layer — fast and concurrent.

📦 Common Use Cases:

• Laravel + RoadRunner (instead of Laravel + PHP-FPM)

• High-traffic applications and APIs

• Microservices

• Real-time apps (e.g., using WebSockets)

• Low-latency, serverless-like services

📉 RoadRunner vs PHP-FPM