Performance comparison of Laravel cache stores
publishedWhen running a high traffic website with Laravel, caching becomes a critical aspect for performance.
Using the Laravel framework it is possible to use different cache stores, e.g. file cache for development and Redis or Memcached for production servers.
So the question is, what is the best cache store for my use case? To answer this question, I wrote a small PHP script to be run with Laravel Tinker.
By default it will create 100 cache items and perform 20 times more reads than writes to all configured and available cache stores.
To run the Laravel cache benchmark, clone or download it from github.com/oliworx/laravel-cache-benchmark and copy the file cache-benchmark.php to the directory of your Laravel project. You may want to edit some settings in the top section of the file. e.g. disable memcache tests if this cache store is not available in your specific setup.
Open a terminal and in your project directory run:
php artisan tinker cache-benchmark.php
The tests will run for some seconds only, and no caches will be flushed, so it is safe to run on a production system too.
The results from my local Mac/Docker setup (PHP 7.4, Redis, Memcached, MariaDB) are:
array: 0.133 seconds, 15815 queries/sec
memcached: 0.517 seconds, 4061 queries/sec
redis: 0.736 seconds, 2853 queries/sec
database: 2.122 seconds, 990 queries/sec
file: 2.461 seconds, 853 queries/sec
Results from a small VPS (1 Xeon core, 1 GB RAM) are quite different:
array: 0.052 seconds, 40243 queries/sec
memcached: 0.13 seconds, 16175 queries/sec
redis: 0.159 seconds, 13209 queries/sec
database: 4.007 seconds, 524 queries/sec
file: 0.16 seconds, 13164 queries/sec
Surprisingly the file cache store is as fast as local Redis!
Conclusion: it is a good idea to benchmark the cache performance on a real system, instead of guessing and making assumptions.