In this recent post to the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc looks at using a popular tool from the Apache project, Apache Bench (or just "ab") to stress-test your application.

There’s no telling when your app might attract a throng of visitors at once. [...] Regardless of the reason, massive influxes of visitors are a double-edged sword: they get you what you always wanted – a chance to prove your worth to a large chunk of the internet’s population – but also often bring with them what you always feared: absolute downtime. [Some] platforms usually offer plugins that can optimize your application while it’s up, so you can fine tune it as you go along, but why not try and predict issues while still developing locally and save yourself time, money and effort in the long run?

He bases the testing off of a Laravel Homestead virtual machine instance and tests a simple "hello world" PHP page to minimize any overhead from other processing. He includes the commands to make a simple ab request and mentions the kinds of request it provides on completion. He moves on from there to something a bit more complex - an actual Laravel-based application using the default "HomeController" and "showWelcome" action/view combination.

Stefan Koopmanschap has a recommendation for all of the developers (really, anyone) out there about their work habits - want to be more productive? Work less.

There are many people (myself included for a long time) that will work more and more when they have more stress. Whether it’s a deadline or simply too much work on your hands, you just start working longer, open your laptop when at home just to finish that one feature, skip lunch or ignore your RSI-breaks. While this may sometimes work, in the long run, this will only make you less productive.

He talks about a few things that can come with "more work" that can make you less productive in the long run. He includes a few recommendations to help "take back that productivity" including:

• Take breaks
• Take regular days off
• Holidays are good
• Don't always work from the office
• Do "fun" work

He also points out that a lot of your level of productivity revolves around stress and how even just changing small things like where you're working from can make a real difference.