The Event Dispatcher

A different axis from the model tiers. The traits make individual models faster; the dispatcher makes every dispatch in the app faster — model events, view rendering, cache operations, your own events. It's a drop-in subclass of Laravel's own dispatcher, and a faithful port of laravel/framework#51184.

What it does

Three optimizations, all behaviour-identical to the stock dispatcher:

• No-listener fast path. Most dispatched events have no listener. Grease short-circuits them off a cached presence check instead of walking the resolution machinery every time.
• Cached listener resolution. makeListener runs once per event, not once per dispatch — the resolved listener set is cached and reused.
• Pre-compiled wildcard patterns. Wildcard listener patterns (eloquent.*, observer patterns, package patterns) are compiled once instead of re-scanned, uncached, on every call.

That last one is the key insight. The naive "just ask hasListeners() before dispatching" idea is a net loss — hasListeners() re-scans every wildcard pattern uncached, so asking "is anyone listening?" can cost more than telling nobody. The win is in optimizing the dispatcher itself, not in gating it from outside.

Behaviour-identical, by test

The model tiers promise byte-identical output. The dispatcher's bar is behavioural: the same listeners fire, in the same order, with the same return values, halting on the same false. That contract is asserted across a parity suite of A/B tests against the stock dispatcher.

What it's worth

Scenario	Δ
dispatch with no listener	−53%
dispatch with listeners	−18%
event-dense request, warm	−56%
event-dense request, cold (non-trivial wildcards)	−47%

On an event-dense request — a page render's worth of dispatches — it roughly halves the event overhead. An Eloquent-only benchmark understates this tier on purpose: its real value is app-wide event traffic that a model benchmark never touches.

Opt in

It is not auto-discovered — you register it explicitly:

// bootstrap/providers.php, or the providers array in config/app.php
Grease\Events\GreaseEventServiceProvider::class,

Registering the provider:

• swaps the bound events singleton for the greased dispatcher,
• carries over any already-registered listeners,
• clears the Event facade's cached root,
• and points Eloquent's static dispatcher at the greased one.

Everything keeps working exactly as before — just faster. Because the parity bar here is behavioural rather than byte-output, it's the one place worth a smoke test in your own suite if you lean heavily on event ordering; the package's own integration tests cover the swap landing correctly in the container, facade, and Eloquent.