Speeding up Laravel tests

A curated list of techniques for making Laravel test suites faster. Apply these in roughly the order shown; environment fixes usually give the biggest wins for the least effort.

When to use

• Test suite takes more than a few seconds per test on average.
• CI duration is climbing and you want to knock minutes off.
• A specific test is slow and you want to audit what it is actually doing.
• You are onboarding a new project and want a standard checklist.

Environment and config

• Set BCRYPT_ROUNDS=4 in .env.testing (or phpunit.xml). Default is 12 and hashing dominates auth tests.
• Disable XDebug. Disable pcov too at scale unless you specifically need coverage.
• Disable background packages in the testing environment: Pulse, Telescope, Nightwatch, and similar 3rd-party packages that do work on every request/command.
• Use WithCachedConfig and WithCachedRoutes traits to avoid re-parsing config and routes on every test.
• Call withoutVite() (or withoutMix()) in your test setup so the framework does not try to resolve built assets.

Fake external interactions

Any interaction with an outside service that is not the subject of the test should be faked.

• Notification::fake(), Mail::fake(), Bus::fake(), Event::fake(), Queue::fake().
• HTTP endpoints that dispatch jobs: fake the queue unless the test is asserting job behavior. Otherwise the jobs execute inline and pull in everything they touch.
• Event listeners: if unrelated listeners are firing and doing work, Event::fake() them. Use Laravel's event system to discover what is being triggered during a slow test.
• Http::preventingStrayRequests() in your test suite. A single slow stray request can punish every test. Note this only catches requests made through Laravel's HTTP client. Audit direct Guzzle / cURL usage separately.
• Sleep::fake(syncWithCarbon: true) so retries and backoffs do not actually sleep. Requires your code to use the Sleep helper rather than PHP's sleep().
• Exceptions::fake() to make sure you are not reporting to Flare/Sentry/Bugsnag from within tests.

Database

• LazilyRefreshDatabase instead of RefreshDatabase. Tests that never touch the DB skip the migration/truncation cost entirely.
• Audit factory usage. Factories are a common hotspot because it is easy to create more models than a test needs. Look for nested create() calls spawning extra rows.
• Use $factory->recycle($model) to create a shared parent once and thread it through nested factory calls, instead of each nested factory creating its own parent.

Profile and diagnose

• ./vendor/bin/pest --profile prints the slowest tests per shard. Start there. Patterns in the top-10 often apply suite-wide.
• Visualize the suite with https://marmelab.com/phpunit-d3-report/ (originally PHPUnit; verify Pest compatibility).
• When a slow test is mysterious, instrument event listeners or add temporary logging to find the unexpected work happening behind the scenes.

Quick reference

Area	Action
Hashing	BCRYPT_ROUNDS=4
Debuggers	Disable XDebug, disable pcov
Background pkgs	Disable Pulse, Telescope, Nightwatch
Config / routes	WithCachedConfig, WithCachedRoutes
Assets	withoutVite() / withoutMix()
External services	Notification::fake(), Mail::fake(), Bus::fake(), Event::fake(), Queue::fake()
HTTP	Http::preventingStrayRequests()
Sleep	Sleep::fake(syncWithCarbon: true)
Exceptions	Exceptions::fake()
DB	LazilyRefreshDatabase
Factories	$factory->recycle($model), audit nested creates
Profiling	pest --profile

Common mistakes

• Enabling RefreshDatabase on every test even when the test does not hit the DB.
• Calling real sleep() or using Carbon in production code, which prevents Sleep::fake() from helping.
• Adding Queue::fake() but still asserting side effects of the job (those will never happen).
• Running the suite with XDebug loaded "just in case" a test fails.
• Leaving BCRYPT_ROUNDS at the default because .env.testing was never created.