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Laravel Valet is a fantastic tool for quickly spinning up local development environments. It's fast, easy to use, and generally "just works". However, if you've ever run into a situation where you're making a large number of concurrent requests (think AJAX calls on page load, or a complex application with lots of background processes), you might have encountered a frustrating issue: requests hanging, seemingly at random. You refresh the page, and sometimes things work, sometimes they don't. The culprit? The default PHP-FPM worker configuration of Valet.
This issue comes to light when you exceed the default number of PHP-FPM workers available to handle incoming requests. Valet uses PHP-FPM, and by default, it's configured with a relatively small number of worker processes. When you bombard your application with a flurry of requests, all the workers get busy, and any subsequent requests get stuck waiting for a worker to become free. This results in those hanging requests, often leading to a frustrating developer experience.
The solution is very easy. We just need to increase the number of PHP-FPM workers available to handle incoming requests.
Go to your PHP-FPM configuration file, which is located at: /opt/homebrew/etc/php/8.4/php-fpm.d/valet-fpm.conf and update the following values:
1# Default configuration: 2#pm = dynamic 3#pm.max_children = 5 4#pm.start_servers = 2 5#pm.min_spare_servers = 1 6#pm.max_spare_servers = 3 7 8# New configuration: 9pm = dynamic10pm.max_children = 20011pm.start_servers = 2012pm.min_spare_servers = 1013pm.max_spare_servers = 2014pm.process_idle_timeout = 10s15pm.max_requests = 500Just run valet restart afterwards and you are good to go!