Load testing, in the language your team already writes

More than seven years ago, our team shipped a Laravel API that passed every unit test, every feature test, and every browser test we threw at it. Staging ran fine and code review was clean. It went out on a Friday afternoon, and by Monday morning the app was returning 502s under just 200 concurrent users.

The database connection pool was exhausted. File-based sessions were creating lock contention. A queued job that ran fine in isolation had stacked up thousands of pending jobs. None of it had shown up in testing, because nothing had ever been tested with more than one user at a time.

The company's first answer was to hire an external firm to run the load tests. The results were useful, but they arrived as a report from people who didn't know the codebase, and the team couldn't rerun them after every change. So load testing came in-house, and the team got familiar with the tools themselves. That exposed the real cost: the tooling lived outside PHP, so every new engineer who joined had to learn a separate language and toolchain before they could write a single test.

VoltTest is the answer to that: load tests you write in PHP, in the repository you already work in, with the framework quirks (CSRF tokens, session cookies, auth flows) handled for you. A PHP team goes from zero to a working load test in a couple of hours, because there is nothing new to learn.