My Laravel Package Idea for "Data Stress": I Need Advice

Laravel Daily| 00:08:00|May 18, 2026

Chapters6

The creator asks for feedback on a local stress testing package idea for Laravel to simulate data loads and measure performance.

A practical peek at a Laravel Daily proof-of-concept tool for stress-testing data loads, with hard lessons on seeding, relationships, and UX.

Summary

Laravel Daily’s creator outlines a live-proof-of-concept for a new package called Data Stress, designed to simulate large data loads locally or on staging to test performance. The video walks through how a simple page loading courses and lessons can be stress-tested by selecting a route, then mapping tables to filled data and setting iteration counts. The concept emphasizes seeding a separate stress database (with a _stress prefix) to avoid touching production data, and it demonstrates a workflow where the tool seeds, runs a three-iteration benchmark, and reports average page and database query times. Filament and Telescope are mentioned as existing tools, but the focus here is local/staging stress testing rather than production-request inspection. The creator shows concrete numbers, like 1,000 courses equaling 20,000 lessons, and observes how a lack of pagination can drastically slow page loads as data scales. He also experiments with polymorphic relationships and complex mappings (e.g., tags and taggables), acknowledging that relationship complexity is one of the trickier parts to get right. Throughout, he asks for feedback on UX, ease of configuring column-level data, and how to handle routes that require parameters (like slugs) in this stress-testing workflow. The goal is to evolve this early prototype into a robust package that can be offered in free and pro tiers, balancing usability with powerful data-stressing capabilities. The video ends with an invitation for the community to suggest what to include or exclude, and how to improve the developer experience.

Key Takeaways

Data Stress aims to stress-test Laravel routes by seeding a separate stress database (with a {underscore}stress prefix) and running multiple iterations to measure page load and query times.
Seeded data examples show 1,000 courses with 20,000 lessons (10 lessons per course) to demonstrate how scale impacts performance and query behavior.
A key insight from the demo is that lack of pagination on large datasets can turn a small dataset into a performance bottleneck during page rendering.
The package currently handles route selection, table mapping, and column-level data templates, but the author flags polymorphic relationships as a complex area to map correctly.
UX considerations raised include how users configure which tables/columns to seed, how to express required route parameters (like slugs), and how to present results clearly.
Security and safety discipline is emphasized by using a separate database for stress testing to avoid risking main data, with the tool actively warning if the main database is targeted.
Future business model questions linger on free vs. paid tiers, feature gating, and sustaining ongoing development for Laravel Daily.

Who Is This For?

Essential viewing for Laravel developers who want to prototype data-heavy stress tests locally or on staging, and for teams designing performance dashboards or tools that benchmark database and page load behavior.

Notable Quotes

""Hello guys. In this video, I want to ask for your advice, early feedback on a Laravel package I'm working on to help you with performance of your projects.""

—Intro and purpose of the video.

""The package would analyze which database tables are included or touched with that route.""

—Describes how the tool maps routes to affected tables.

""The data is seeded to a separate database, so package is very strict, as strict as possible, that you would have separate database with {underscore} stress as prefix.""

—Emphasizes isolation of stress data to avoid main DB interference.

""There’s no pagination. So, this home page may work for four courses, but if you see 10,000, all 10,000 will be loaded.""

—Highlights a performance pitfall observed during testing.

""I’m still not sure if it's going to be free or paid package, probably it will be both, so there will be some extra featured in a pro version to sustain my work here at Laravel Daily.""

—Discusses potential monetization and sustainability.

Questions This Video Answers

How can I safely run data-stress tests in Laravel without touching production databases?
How do I map large relational datasets (including polymorphic relations) for stress testing in Laravel?
What configuration options should a stress-testing tool expose for routes, tables, and column data?
Why is pagination important when stress-testing large datasets in Laravel, and how can I implement it in a test setup?
Can I run multiple stress-test iterations in Laravel and compare results across routes and database queries?

Laravel Data StressLaravel DailyLaravel Stress TestingDatabase SeedingMySQL stress testingLaravel Polymorphic RelationshipsTelescopeFilament Performance BenchmarkingSQL Query Analysis

Full Transcript

Hello guys. In this video, I want to ask for your advice, early feedback on a Laravel package I'm working on to help you with performance of your projects. So, imagine a scenario, you're working on a project, you've created the first version, you're testing with some fake data like this very simple page, but will your project handle multiple thousands of records? So, it looks okay with like four courses. Would it look okay with 100 courses, 1,000 courses, and 1,000 users or 100 lessons per course, stuff like that? How do you simulate those scenarios? And of course, for performance, we have tools like Laravel Nightwatch or Laravel Telescope, for example, but those are mostly for production projects to inspect real requests from real users. In this case, I want to handle the scenario when the project is still local on your machine or on staging server, and you want to simulate the data load. So, I will show you two examples of this proof of concept. For now, it's not released yet. It's internal in my project, so I'm playing around with packages Laravel daily, not sure even what would be the actual name of the package, but the focus is stress testing with data. So, for this simple scenario, this page loads courses with lessons. And then, with that package or tool, you would visit a separate page, and you would choose the route from routes web that you want to stress test. So, this comes from real routes web. Then, you choose the route, and then the package would analyze which database tables are included or touched with that route. And then, you have step two, where you define which tables you want to load with which amount of data. Let me zoom that in. So, for example, courses, 1,000 rows, you may want to set that to 10,000, and then you may set the values for columns of that database table. You may choose template, you may choose null and stuff like that. And then the package detects that courses has many lessons, so 10 lessons per course, or you may set that to 20, for example, and then you set the amount of iterations, how many times that route would be loaded with this amount of data. That data is seeded to a separate database, so package is very strict, as strict as possible, that you would have separate database with {underscore} stress as prefix, required prefix, otherwise the package wouldn't even work, because it runs migrate fresh. I know it is dangerous, but specifically I emphasize, at least for now, that the database should be separate. So, if you try to run that on the main database, the package would flag it. But for now, I have created that courses stress local MySQL database, which is here in my config database as a separate MySQL database, and if I run seed data and run benchmark, it will try to load the same page three times after seeding this amount of data. So, if we go to that courses stress database table now, we will see that, order by ID, we have 1,000 courses and lessons, yep, 20,000 lessons, so 20 lessons per course. And then the result of that benchmark is, from those three iterations, average page load time, and how much of that is on database queries. In this case, only one query is loaded, because we're eager loading successfully, but here you may find another thing that you didn't think about. For example, let's seed 10,000 courses. Probably for courses, it's not a realistic scenario, but still, 10 lessons each. Let's run benchmark again. In this case, it will probably take some more time. Iteration, three iterations. See now, 700 milliseconds with more data. Why? And the reason you may notice from query of courses is that there's no pagination. So, this home page may work for four courses, but if you see 10,000, all 10,000 will be loaded. So, the query itself is slower and the page load is of course slower to load that HTML of the courses. So, yeah, this is a simple example. Also, I've tested it on my filament examples. So, this is the website and this is the page to stress with data analyze route from those routes and I exclude a lot of routes like filament, like telescope, like socialite, stripe web hooks and stuff like that. There's a separate kind of ignore route config and ignore tables config. So, I'm ignoring, for example, pulse tables, system tables like session and stuff like that. But in this case, I want to set, for example, project types 10 project types, but let's put it 1,000 project per project type. Also, there are tags and taggables and this is the most tricky part of the package which I'm working on heavily. That's why I didn't release yet because with relationships, it gets tricky to map all the relationships correctly, especially with polymorphic relations, but let's see if it works. And also, I have separate filament examples stress database locally. Will it work? Okay, it is working. And yeah, it succeeded. 200 milliseconds. These are the database queries and then from here I may inspect if I want to optimize those queries or if I want to optimize page load time, which is much bigger than the database query. So, something else is slowing down the page. Maybe big images, maybe some for each in PHP, stuff like that. So, this is a separate topic. So, yeah, this is the proof of concept I have for now under code name data stress, and now I need your advice. Which parts of this process would you have done differently, maybe? What would you include or exclude? And maybe you have some advice on UX, how to make this part, especially this part, better, easier to set the columns and tables and relationships? Because I think when I release that package, and that's why I didn't release it yet, again, in your cases with your database tables, I think you will have more complex scenarios than my page here with like 20-plus tables, and then it gets really complex and may not even work, especially if some data entries require specific values. So, for example, some routes require parameters, so project slug, now I need to specify the slug, but for that page to actually work, I need to specify the slug here as well, right? Let's actually try it out. I'm not sure if it works, is testing kind of in live mode. So, test slug project, let's put one project, and let's set columns slug for specific value of test, and let's leave everything as is, and let's see, will it throw some SQL error? Not sure. No, it actually didn't. But at the same time, I don't see that slug used in any of those queries, so something was definitely wrong here. I will debug it after this video. So, yeah, what do you think? I often ask at the end of my video, so what do you think about certain tool or Laravel tip, but in this case, I particularly am interested in your advice based on very early prototype or proof of concept that you saw in this video. As they say, help me to help you and release this package with better functionality. Side note, I'm still not sure if it's going to be free or paid package, probably it will be both, so there will be some extra featured in a pro version to sustain my work here at Laravel Daily, but this is still a long-term question for now. At this point, I want to make it workable, usable, and actually valuable. So, yeah, let's discuss all of that in the comments below, and see you guys in other videos.