Flattening Laravel Blade Files

Blade is a PHP templating engine built into Laravel.

Generally Blade is fast enough for almost all cases. This repo serves as an idea of how someone could improve Blade performance, especially when rendering large templates that utilize a lot of @include.

Using @include (or components) is a lot slower than writing everything into a single Blade file.

Most of the time we don't care about this slowness, splitting templates into multiple files makes them more readable and reusable. And most of the time Blade itself is not our main performance issue.

How to speed up Blade

This repo includes a FlattenBladeFiles command, that can be used to flatten all cached blade files into a single file.

This is achieved by temporarily replacing the @include directive and instead loading the cached view files directly into the template. This flattening is repeated some amount of times to accommodate nested @inludes.

You can try it by copying the command into your project and running:

php artisan view:flatten

How much faster is it really?

We are gaining the most in terms of fastness when including a simple component a lot of times As an example we are including this simple component 100.000 times in a @for loop:

@if(!empty($countryCode))
    <img src="https://somewebsite/{{$countryCode}}.png">
@endif

With 100.000 includes the render time on a local machine is around 1300ms, with a flattened template render time is around 40ms. These numbers show us that the overhead of an @include is around 30 times more expensive than the actual rendering of this simple component inside a for loop.

In real live examples with big tables performance gain is of course considerably smaller. An example: A hot endpoint from a project I'm working on was able to handle twice as many requests when views were flattened (a big view with around 400 nested @includes).

What's the catch?

When running php artisan view:flatten your templates won't necessarily update automatically on change, you'll have to run php artisan view:cache or php artisan view:flatten again. The command is only suitable for a production environment where you don't plan to change views. Variables that are declared in a view are generally unset afterwards. This is detected via a regex and might not include all forms of variable declaration, leading to a potentially different behaviour if you tend to write a lot of plain PHP code in your templates.

What's next

It would be interesting to achieve something similar for components or test the behaviour with component libraries. This project can also be converted into a library if there's general interest