A Day of Performance Hardening: Hunting N+1s and Killing Wasted Queries in Laravel (opens in new tab)

Performance work has a reputation for being glamorous — the heroic "we cut latency by 80%" story. Most days it's not that. Most days it's a janitorial pass: you go looking for the queries you're firing without realizing it, and you quietly delete them. That was today. One sustained sweep across an app and the package that backs it, chasing the same theme everywhere: stop asking the database for things you don't use. Let me walk through the patterns, because they generalize to any Laravel app ...