Streaming Responses in Laravel: A Guide to Efficient Data Delivery

Need to handle large responses efficiently? Laravel's streaming response feature lets you send data chunks as they're generated! Let's explore this powerful performance optimization technique.

Basic Streaming

Here's the simplest way to create a streaming response:

return response()->stream(function () {
    foreach (streamedContent() as $chunk) {
        echo $chunk;
        ob_flush();
        flush();
    }
}, 200, ['X-Accel-Buffering' => 'no']);

Real-World Example

Here's how you might use streaming for a large report generation:

class ReportController extends Controller
{
    public function downloadLargeReport()
    {
        return response()->stream(function () {
            // CSV Headers
            echo "ID,Name,Email,Created At\n";
            ob_flush();
            flush();

            // Process users in chunks
            User::query()
                ->chunk(1000, function ($users) {
                    foreach ($users as $user) {
                        echo sprintf(
                            "%d,%s,%s,%s\n",
                            $user->id,
                            $user->name,
                            $user->email,
                            $user->created_at
                        );
                        ob_flush();
                        flush();
                    }
                });
        }, 200, [
            'Content-Type' => 'text/csv',
            'Content-Disposition' => 'attachment; filename="users.csv"',
            'X-Accel-Buffering' => 'no'
        ]);
    }

    public function streamActivityLog()
    {
        return response()->stream(function () {
            echo "<pre>\n";
            ob_flush();
            flush();

            Activity::query()
                ->orderBy('id', 'desc')
                ->chunk(100, function ($activities) {
                    foreach ($activities as $activity) {
                        echo sprintf(
                            "[%s] %s: %s\n",
                            $activity->created_at->format('Y-m-d H:i:s'),
                            $activity->user->name,
                            $activity->description
                        );
                        ob_flush();
                        flush();
                    }
                });
        }, 200, [
            'Content-Type' => 'text/plain',
            'X-Accel-Buffering' => 'no'
        ]);
    }
}

Streaming responses help reduce memory usage and improve user experience by sending data as it's generated rather than waiting for the entire response to be ready.

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