Islam A-Elwafa

When your Laravel app hits real traffic, will it fly… or will it fall over?

Most load-testing tools make you jump through hoops — learn a new scripting language, spin up external services, or fight with configs that feel like they belong to another ecosystem.

That’s why I built the Laravel Performance Testing package:
a native, PHP-first way to run load and stress tests right inside your Laravel project — powered by the Volt Test PHP SDK.

You write your tests in plain PHP, keep them version-controlled with your codebase, and run them with a single Artisan command. No context-switching. No external scripts. Just Laravel, PHP, and the performance insights you need before your users find the bottlenecks.

Performance testing is an essential process in software development that evaluates a system's responsiveness, stability, and scalability under different conditions. It helps identify bottlenecks and ensures applications meet performance expectations before deployment. There are several types of performance testing, each serving a different purpose. By understanding these types, you can choose the right tests to conduct based on your application's requirements. In this article, we will explore these types, their differences, and provide practical examples.

In this tutorial, we will explore how to perform stress testing on a Laravel application using the VoltTest PHP SDK. You will learn how to:

• Simulate multiple users interacting with your Laravel application.
• Test user registration and authentication workflows.
• Measure application performance under load.
• Extract dynamic values like CSRF tokens during test execution.
• Use a CSV file as a data source for testing.
• Analyze and optimize performance bottlenecks.

By the end of this guide, you will be able to confidently run automated performance tests to ensure your Laravel app is scalable and resilient.

Performance testing is crucial in modern application development, yet many developers skip it due to complex tools that don’t fit into PHP workflows. Today, I'm excited to introduce VoltTest PHP SDK, a powerful load testing tool with a PHP-native interface backed by Go's exceptional performance capabilities.