Nginx + OPcache Settings That Actually Matter for Laravel on a VPS

On a typical 2-4GB VPS, three changes account for most of the win:

1. OPcache with validation off

opcache.memory_consumption=192
opcache.validate_timestamps=0

PHP stops re-reading files on every request; reset the cache on deploy instead.

2. Static asset caching in Nginx

location ~* \.(css|js|webp|woff2)$ {
    expires 1y;
    add_header Cache-Control "public, immutable";
}

3. FastCGI buffers

Bump fastcgi_buffers so large HTML responses are not written to disk. Measure before and after with wrk — on a recent client server these three changes doubled requests per second.