Is 'api.routes' instance required?

[bslinger]

Q	A
Bug?	no
New Feature?	no
Framework	Laravel
Framework version	7.14.1
Package version	3.0.0
PHP version	7.4.6

We were seeing drastic performance degradation after upgrading from Laravel 5.6, Dingo v2.0.0, PHP 5.6 to Laravel 7.14, Dingo v3.0.0, PHP 7.4, and when profiling the code Dingo was slowing things down a lot, even when the routes were cached.

After digging in further today, I narrowed it down to the \Dingo\Api\Routing\Router::setAdapterRoutes method, in particular the 'api.routes' instance being set by \Dingo\Api\Routing\Router::getRoutes which runs \Dingo\Api\Routing\Router::createRoute on every defined route and was taking multiple seconds on every request - I couldn't find anywhere this instance was being used, so created my own version of the Router class to avoid performing that second step and performance is vastly improved while seemingly not having affected functionality.

I just wanted to check in here and see if anybody with more in-depth knowledge of Dingo might let me know if I'm missing anything here?

[specialtactics]

Those functions are there to maintain compatibility with Laravel's routing interface, they are definitely used (but not in every request, they need to be called by something).

I think there are many other reasons that should be done again for compatibility's sake - it won't be obvious until something breaks.

However I don't really get (unless you are massively exaggerating) what that operation takes "seconds" for you - I've never seen it take so much as 100ms.

Can you show me some profiling info or something?

[bslinger]

Under load it is taking multiple seconds, and is definitely the bottleneck causing high CPU usage when we deploy our new code under production conditions. Here's a NewRelic trace (which I unfortunately can't download in structured format):

Is there a way I could set it up to lazily create these routes then? From what I can see, when the routes are not cached it only creates a \Dingo\Api\Routing\Route object for the matched route, via \Dingo\Api\Http\Middleware\PrepareController::handle, but when getRoutes is called via \Dingo\Api\Routing\Router::setAdapterRoutes it creates one for every route in the system, which in our case is approximately 235 routes.

[specialtactics]

Route caching doesn't actually work/improve performance, this has been discussed at length on the laravel github.

It seems to me like what you are seeing is the routing overhead of a framework under load conditions, nothing more. I thought you meant it takes seconds in general, of course routing is a bottleneck if you don't have enough resources for the traffic.

All routes have to be created before they can be assessed for which to pick, and I do recommend you disable route caching, because it degrades performance.

[bslinger]

Can you elaborate on route caching not working? It seems to work fine to me and removes the need for us to iterate over a number of files to create the available routes on every request. Is there an issue you can reference with more information about it?

My point was that under similar load on Laravel 5 and Dingo 2.0, the routing was not causing this bottleneck. When using route caching, this section of the Dingo Router is the bottleneck. When not using route caching, finding the routes takes more time than it used to as well, though that seems to be more of a Laravel issue.

[specialtactics]

Hey @bslinger I don't have a link, unfortunately, but there were 2 discussions on the laravel github about it.

Both Laravel's routing and the underlying Symfony routing have changed a lot (in fact there was a major Symfony version upgrade between 5 and 7), so it has not stayed the same.