Choosing the Right Drivers for Queues, Sessions, and Cache in Laravel

Laravel gives you a lot of freedom when it comes to queues, cache, and sessions. But that flexibility can create real confusion in production. Should you use Redis? The database? Something else?

After working with various setups across different projects, here’s what I’ve learned about each driver’s actual behavior, where things break, and what usually works best.

This is based on what’s worked for me across various projects. Your setup might be different, and that’s fine. Take what’s useful.

Queues — Redis or SQS

Queues move slow work (emails, imports, reports) out of your request cycle. The driver you pick defines where those jobs live and how they’re processed.

Database queues are easy to start with — no extra services needed. They’re perfectly fine for occasional jobs (like one per hour) or less heavy websites. The nice thing is you can inspect the jobs table directly in SQL to debug failed jobs. If you’re using Laravel Forge, it’s dead simple — just type “database” in the queue driver field and you’re good to go. They only become a problem when you’re processing hundreds of jobs per minute — multiple workers fighting over the same jobs table creates row lock contention.

Redis is fast, has low latency, and works beautifully with Laravel Horizon. That’s the setup I use most often. You get visual job monitoring, automatic retries, and it’s rock-solid if you configure it properly. The downside is you need Redis infrastructure, and it’s memory-based — so you need to plan capacity.

SQS is the go-to if you’re on AWS. Fully managed, durable, elastic. Slightly higher latency than Redis, and there’s a per-operation cost, but you don’t manage any infrastructure. Just configure a Dead Letter Queue and make sure your visibility timeout is longer than your longest-running job.

Sync runs jobs in the HTTP request. Never use this in production.

Sessions — Database Wins for Most Apps

Laravel sessions store user state — authentication, CSRF tokens, flash messages. In production, this choice affects reliability and concurrency more than you’d expect.

Database sessions are my default

Why? They’re stable, transactional, and handle concurrent requests without issues.

I’ve seen too many apps hit weird 419 CSRF errors with Redis sessions. Redis handles busy sites fine — but if you’re running a heavy Ajax app with lots of concurrent session writes, you’ll hit those CSRF token mismatches. It’s a concurrency thing. Database sessions with ACID guarantees just sidestep the problem entirely.

Database sessions use existing infrastructure, they’re easy to inspect directly in SQL, and performance is completely fine for real-world apps. The difference between database and Redis session reads is milliseconds, and for most applications that doesn’t matter.

The only thing to know is that Laravel cleans up old sessions automatically via the lottery system (configured in config/session.php). The default is a 2% chance per request, which works fine. For high-traffic sites, you might want to tune that probability or use the scheduler instead.

Redis sessions — fast but with caveats

Redis is faster on paper. It’s great for horizontally scaled setups with multiple app servers. But in my experience, I only reach for Redis sessions when:

If you’re running a standard Laravel app with typical form interactions and lots of Ajax, database sessions are safer and simpler.

Cookie sessions — for tiny apps only

Cookie sessions scale automatically because there’s no server state. But you’re limited to about 4KB, the entire cookie gets sent with every request, and you can’t invalidate sessions server-side. Only use this for very small, stateless sites.

File sessions — fine for small sites

File sessions work perfectly fine for low-traffic, single-server setups. The main problem in my experience is garbage collection on busy sites — the session files grow over time, and whoever gets the unlucky request when GC kicks in will see a really slow response.

The other issue is they don’t share across nodes, so if you scale to multiple servers you’ll get inconsistent logins. But for a simple site on one server? They’re totally fine.

Cache — Redis for Most Cases

Laravel’s cache layer powers query caching, rate limiting, and more.

File cache is fine for small, single-server sites. No need to overcomplicate things if you’re just caching a few queries. It’s slower than Redis and uses some CPU and disk space, but for simple sites it’s good enough. The problems show up when you need to share cache across multiple servers or when you need features like tags and atomic locks.

Database cache is slow and doesn’t support tags or atomic locks. I don’t recommend it.

Redis gives you in-memory speed, shared state across servers, cache tags, atomic locks, and native rate limiting support. For anything beyond a simple site, it’s the best choice. Always set TTLs, and monitor your eviction policy to avoid surprises.

If you’re on AWS and going serverless, DynamoDB is a reasonable alternative with different semantics.

What I Actually Use

Here’s my production setup for most projects:

Database sessions give me ACID consistency and fewer headaches with Ajax and CSRF. Redis is unbeatable for cache and queues, where speed and shared state actually matter.

Common Mistakes

A few things I’ve seen break in production:

419 CSRF errors with Redis sessions — happens on heavy Ajax apps with concurrent session writes. Fix by switching to database sessions or making those routes stateless.

File sessions on multiple servers — leads to random logouts and inconsistent login state. Don’t do this.

Database sessions without cleanup — can cause table bloat, but Laravel’s lottery system handles this automatically. Just make sure it’s configured properly in config/session.php.

Redis flushes or memory evictions — lost sessions and cache. Tune persistence settings and maxmemory policies.

Oversized cookie sessions — causes silent logout issues when you exceed the size limit.

Final Thoughts

If you want a safe, production-ready stack that just works:

Keep it simple, predictable, and maintainable. That’s what matters in production.