I use Laravel daily. With xdebug on, the request shows down easily 2-5x times. For a real performance benchmark turn that off, and Laravel is easily in the 50ms response time range.

It could also be that they don’t know how to optimize PHP settings. OPcache is amazing for performance, but by default caches only 1/5th the number of files in an app. I boost that to 20-40k just to ensure performance.

Edit:

Ouch, I just looked at the Dockerfile. No wonder it is slow! He misconfigured the Laravel tests. The built-in PHP server is known to have less than optimal performance, and he used NGINX as a reverse-forward proxy to it. Not cool. At least set it up with PHP-FPM + nginx to see how it really runs.