Introducing BenchKit: The Laravel Performance Testing Tool We've All Been Waiting For

If you've been following along, you've been watching us add FrankenPHP support to serversideup/php. This is our first time running FrankenPHP and it got us thinking: just how much faster is FrankenPHP compared to the traditional PHP-FPM + NGINX setup?

We found scripts that we could run, but it didn't feel repeatable if we wanted to test against different configurations or hosts. So we decided to build a tool that is completely open-source, standardized, and community-driven.

Meet BenchKit

BenchKit is our answer to Laravel performance testing. It's a completely open-source Laravel application designed to give you real, actionable performance data about your setup.

Here's what makes it special:

Hardware benchmarking - We use Yet Another Bench Script that runs GeekBench to test your underlying hardware performance, so you know if bottlenecks are coming from your code or your machine.

Network speed testing - Built-in CloudFlare speed tests help you understand network performance impacts on your applications.

Laravel-specific performance tests - The real magic happens here. We run standardized PHP tests against Laravel itself, measuring everything in requests per second and operations per second.

Real-World Laravel Testing

The core of BenchKit focuses on what matters most to Laravel developers: CRUD operations. We simulate real database workloads with:

• Random reads from your database
• Random updates across different models
• Random deletions and creations
• CSV imports and exports

All of this gets measured and presented in a clean, standardized format that gives you operations per second - a number you can actually use to compare different hosting setups, PHP configurations, or infrastructure changes.

Built for the Community

Our vision for BenchKit is to make it the go-to tool for Laravel performance testing. We want to make it easy for everyone to run performance tests on their Laravel applications and share the results with the community.

We've added contributing guidelines to make it easy for anyone to review and improve the product.

Docker-First, But Not Docker-Only

True to our roots with serversideup/php, BenchKit is designed to run perfectly in Docker with a single command. But we know not everyone uses Docker, so we're making sure it works just as well in traditional hosting environments.

This means you can actually compare Docker vs. non-Docker performance for Laravel - something that's can be hard to do until now.

Real-Time Results

One of the technical challenges we solved was making sure everything runs in a single container while still providing real-time updates. No need for additional containers or complex setups - just run BenchKit and watch your tests progress in real-time.

When your tests complete, you get a detailed results page showing:

• Create, Read, Update, Delete performance metrics
• Hardware performance details
• Network speed results
• Environment configuration details
• Shareable results for comparing different setups

How We Build in Public

Since BenchKit is completely open source, we thought this would be a perfect opportunity to show you exactly how we approach building applications. From our Figma designs to our GitHub project management, from our QA process to our deployment strategy - it's all there for you to see and learn from.

We use the same process for our client work, and it might just help you level up your own projects too.

What's Next

We're building BenchKit completely in public, and we'd love for you to follow along. Whether you're curious about performance testing, interested in our development process, or want to contribute to the project itself, there's a place for you.

The goal is simple: make Laravel performance testing accessible, standardized, and community-driven. No more guessing whether that optimization actually helped, or wondering if your new hosting provider is really faster.

Want to get involved? Jump into our Discord and let us know what you think. We're excited to see what the Laravel community builds with this.

Ready to benchmark your Laravel app?

Check out BenchKit on GitHub →

Performance testing just got a whole lot more interesting.

✌️ - Jay