PHP Docker Image and opcache

Posted: 2020-07-25 12:19:25 by Alasdair Keyes

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I've recently started working on a new project using NGINX, PHP 7.4, Redis, PostgreSQL and Laravel 7.

As it's a new project I thought I would Dockerise it from the start. After configuring my docker-compose.yml file I built the environment and installed Laravel7 with the Laravel Debugbar (https://packagist.org/packages/barryvdh/laravel-debugbar)

I noticed that the bootstrapping of the basic Laravel App was taking over 100ms. I ran the config cache config:cache and it barely made any difference.

This didn't seem right to me but I had a number of variables and I was unsure of where to start looking... or if it was a problem at all

• This was my first use of Laravel 7 - Maybe it had just got slow since Version 5?
• This was using Docker - Maybe my laptop just wasn't too speedy or Docker itself was adding an overhead?

Thankfully the first part of my investigation found me a solution. I created a phpinfo() page on an existing Laravel 5 setup and on the Docker container. It turns out that the opcache isn't enabled on the Docker image by default.

Adding the following RUN statement to my DockerFile sorted the issue

docker-php-ext-install opcache

After restarting the container, the app bootstraps in 25-30ms. I'm unsure why opcache isn't enabled by default, I can't think of any problems it would cause and I would imagine in over 99% of situations users would want it on... no one wants slow PHP.

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