Test Performance Reference

Environment and tooling optimizations for faster Laravel test suites. These are project-level or CI-level settings — not per-test code changes.

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.
Http::preventingStrayRequests() in your base Pest.php. 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) in your base Pest.php so retries and backoffs do not actually sleep.
Exceptions::fake() to make sure you are not reporting to Flare/Sentry/Bugsnag from within tests.

./vendor/bin/pest --profile prints the slowest tests per shard. Start there. Patterns in the top-10 often apply suite-wide.
When a slow test is mysterious, instrument event listeners or add temporary logging to find the unexpected work happening behind the scenes.

Area	Action
Hashing	`BCRYPT_ROUNDS=4`
Debuggers	Disable XDebug, disable pcov
Background pkgs	Disable Pulse, Telescope, Nightwatch
Config / routes	`WithCachedConfig`, `WithCachedRoutes`
Assets	`withoutVite()` / `withoutMix()`
HTTP	`Http::preventingStrayRequests()`
Sleep	`Sleep::fake(syncWithCarbon: true)`
Exceptions	`Exceptions::fake()`
Profiling	`pest --profile`

Running the suite with XDebug loaded "just in case" a test fails.
Leaving BCRYPT_ROUNDS at the default because .env.testing was never created.
Calling real sleep() or using Carbon in production code, which prevents Sleep::fake() from helping.