Performance

These numbers come from the included benchmark: 10 custom fields per record, a value for every field, PHP 8.5, and databases in Docker on one laptop. Your numbers depend on your hardware. Compare the shape, not the exact times.

Reading

20,000 records and 200,000 values, loaded at once:

	SQLite	MySQL 8.4	PostgreSQL 17
Plain Eloquent, same rows (baseline)	3.9 s	4.4 s	3.9 s
withCustomFields()->get()	4.6 s	5.0 s	5.2 s
listCustomFields() on every record	1.9 s	1.9 s	2.2 s
toArray() on every record	2.9 s	2.8 s	3.2 s

• Eager loading always takes 2 queries (records and values), plus 1 query per request for field definitions. The number of records or fields doesn't change this.
• Memory is the same as plain Eloquent: about 330 MB for these 220,000 models.
• For bigger sets, chunk the query. chunkById(1000) over 100,000 records ran in about 25 s, with flat memory (1 MB growth) and 2 queries per chunk.

Reservation::withCustomFields()->chunkById(1000, function ($reservations) {
    foreach ($reservations as $reservation) {
        // ...
    }
});

Filtering

100,000 records and 1,000,000 values. One query each, with exact results checked:

	SQLite	MySQL 8.4	PostgreSQL 17
equality on a select	0.16 s	0.25 s	0.06 s
numeric range	0.18 s	0.48 s	0.09 s
date range	0.18 s	0.43 s	0.05 s
list contains	0.18 s	0.46 s	0.09 s
text contains	0.20 s	0.43 s	0.06 s
two filters combined	0.22 s	0.44 s	0.10 s

Filter time grows linearly with the number of values for that field. See Querying for why there is no index on the values.

Writing

A write takes about 1.5–4 ms per record for 3 fields. That covers validation, one read of the existing rows, and one update per changed value. The package doesn't write unchanged values.

A transaction around a bulk loop doesn't change much. Eloquent and the validator take the time, not the commit.

Run the benchmark

PERF_RECORDS=100000 composer bench

Tips

• Set $customFields on the model. Then the first fill per request doesn't need a query for the field keys.
• Use withCustomFields() or $loadCustomFields = true for lists.
• Turn on the cache to skip the definitions query on each request.