Optimization #

After your website has been deployed into the production environment (a hosting or VPS), it's time to apply some optimization to make it work more stable and also improve performance.

Configuring the queues #

There are some tasks that take some time to perform during a typical web request such as generating image conversions or sending the email notifications. Thankfully, Laravel allows you to easily create queued jobs that may be processed in the background. By moving time-intensive tasks to a queue, our application can respond to web requests with blazing speed and provide a better user experience to your customers.

By default, the queue system is configured with the sync driver that uses the main thread for the execution of tasks which is useful only when you are in the development environment. When it's come to the production environment you should consider some other options to run your queue.

The easiest way to set up a queue connection is to use the database driver which requires less configuration. From your command line run the following commands:

php artisan queue:table
php artisan migrate

And don't forget to instruct your application to use the database driver by updating the QUEUE_CONNECTIONvariable in your application's .env file:

QUEUE_CONNECTION=database

Finally, use queue:work to start a queue worker and process new jobs as they are pushed onto the queue

php artisan queue:work

For more information about the Laravel queue system please read on Laravel Docs.

Setting up media optimization tools #

Cartify use the Media Library package from Spatie to manage all the media, and it would be nice if you could install some of the following tools (optional of course) that will help optimize the media better. Those tools are:

• JpegOptim
• Optipng
• Pngquant 2
• SVGO
• Gifsicle

Here's how to install all the optimizers on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install jpegoptim optipng pngquant gifsicle
npm install -g svgo

Here's how to install the binaries on macOS (using Homebrew):

brew install jpegoptim
brew install optipng
brew install pngquant
brew install svgo
brew install gifsicle