DEV Community: Meera9

When My Laravel Queue Kept Stopping, the Queue Wasn't the Real Problem

Meera9 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:56:59 +0000

This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Clear the Lineup powered by Sentry.

The Problem

I had a Laravel application connected to Make.com.

Make.com was sending requests every 30 minutes, and Laravel was processing them through a queue.

Everything worked — until the server restarted.

My first approach was simple:

nohup php artisan queue:work redis &

The worker ran fine, but after a server restart, it was gone.

🔴 1. Why did the queue stop?

Server restart → nohup worker dies → queue stops processing

nohup keeps a process running in the background, but it doesn't give me a reliable process supervisor.

So I needed the worker to automatically come back.

The First Fix: cPanel Cron + `flock`

I moved the queue worker startup to a cPanel Cron job.

I also used flock so that Cron wouldn't create multiple queue workers.

/usr/bin/flock -n storage/framework/queue-worker.lock \
php artisan queue:work redis \
--queue=default --sleep=3 --tries=3 \
--timeout=120 --max-time=120

Now:

Server restarts → Cron starts the worker again
Worker already running → flock prevents another worker
Worker processes jobs → no manual restart

That solved the queue-worker problem.

But then I found another problem.

The Second Problem: Make.com Started Timing Out

The queue was running.

Redis was running.

But Make.com started returning 504 timeout errors.

I initially thought the queue was still the problem.

It wasn't.

🟠 2. The Hidden Bottleneck

My server had:

65 GB RAM
20 CPU cores

But PHP-FPM was configured with:

pm.max_children = 5
pm.max_requests = 20
pm.process_idle_timeout = 10

That meant only 5 PHP requests could be handled concurrently by that PHP-FPM pool.

So the flow became:

Make.com → Laravel → PHP-FPM → requests wait → timeout

The important discovery was:

The server had plenty of resources. PHP-FPM simply wasn't configured to use them effectively for the workload.

The Final Fix

I tuned PHP-FPM for the server's actual capacity and kept the queue worker managed by Cron + flock.

🟢 3. The Final Architecture

cPanel Cron → flock → Laravel Queue Worker → Redis

and

Make.com → Laravel API → PHP-FPM

After the changes:

✅ Queue worker automatically starts after restart
✅ flock prevents duplicate workers
✅ PHP-FPM can handle more concurrent requests
✅ Make.com requests stop timing out
✅ No more manually restarting everything

What I Learned

The biggest lesson wasn't about Laravel queues.

It was about looking at the whole request path.

I was initially focused on:

"Why does my queue keep stopping?"

The better question was:

"Where exactly is my system becoming the bottleneck?"

A queue problem isn't always a queue problem.

Sometimes the real bottleneck is before the queue.

Final Architecture

                 Make.com
                    │
                    ▼
              Laravel API
                    │
                    ▼
                PHP-FPM
             (enough workers)
                    │
                    ▼
                  Redis
                    │
                    ▼
             Queue Worker
                    │
                    ▼
             Processed Jobs

        cPanel Cron + flock
                 │
                 └── keeps worker reliable

The result was a more reliable Laravel + Redis + Make.com workflow without manually restarting everything after a server restart.

Best Use of Sentry

Best Use of Google AI

How I Fixed Broken Portrait/Landscape Gallery Alignment (and Open-Sourced It)

Meera9 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 06:57:48 +0000

Why I Built a Responsive Image Strip Gallery (and Published It for Every Framework)

A few weeks ago I ran into a layout problem that sounds simple on paper: put portrait and landscape photos in the same row, aligned, without cropping them into ugly square boxes.

It turned out that no gallery — not Squarespace's built-in options, not the popular npm galleries — actually solves this cleanly. So I built one myself: image-strip-gallery, a fixed-column strip gallery that works in React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, plain JS, and as a copy-paste block for Squarespace and WordPress.

Here's the problem, why the usual answers fall short, and how the package solves it.

The problem: masonry breaks on mixed orientations

Squarespace's Section and Masonry gallery types are great for uniform grids, but they have a specific weakness — they don't keep portrait and landscape images aligned on the same row. Because masonry layouts stack images into columns of varying height, a tall portrait photo and a wide landscape photo end up with mismatched row baselines. You lose that clean, editorial "strip" look where six photos of different shapes sit level with each other.

This isn't a hypothetical problem — I found a whole Squarespace forum thread of people asking for exactly this and getting workarounds instead of a real fix.

The usual workaround — and why it's a bad trade

The common fix is to force every image into the same crop box: uniform width, uniform height, object-fit: cover. Rows do line up — but you lose composition. A landscape shot gets cropped into a square, a portrait gets its subject clipped. For photography-led sites (portfolios, product shots, editorial layouts), that's not acceptable.

What the package actually does

Instead of cropping, the gallery keeps each image's natural aspect ratio and solves alignment at the row level:

A fixed number of images per row (default: 6 desktop, 2 mobile)
Every row shares one height
Each image's width is calculated from its own aspect ratio to fit that shared row height
Portrait and landscape images sit side by side in the same row, fully aligned, uncropped

The result is the "strip" look people were asking for on that forum thread — without the crop-box compromise.

Built for how people actually ship sites today

Because I do full-stack work across Laravel, Vue, and React projects — and because half my audience for this needed a no-code option — I shipped it two ways:

A copy-paste HTML/CSS/JS version for Squarespace and WordPress — no npm, no build step, just paste into a Code Block and Custom CSS panel.
An npm package with dedicated entry points for React/Next.js and Vue/Nuxt, plus a vanilla-JS core that works directly in Angular, Svelte, or plain HTML.

It's lightweight (no jQuery dependency), SSR-safe for Next.js, includes an optional row-by-row fade-in animation, and every layout parameter — columns, gap, breakpoint, row height, animation timing — is configurable.

npm install @meerathanki09/image-strip-gallery

import { ResponsiveImageStripGallery } from '@meerathanki09/image-strip-gallery/react';

<ResponsiveImageStripGallery
  images={images}
  columns={{ desktop: 6, mobile: 2 }}
  onImageClick={(image, index) => console.log(index, image)}
/>

Why I'm sharing this

I build a lot of client sites where photography matters — portfolios, product pages, event galleries — and I kept hitting this same wall. Rather than solving it once per project, I built it as a reusable, framework-agnostic package and published it publicly so anyone hitting the same forum thread I found doesn't have to choose between misaligned rows and cropped photos.

If you're dealing with the same layout problem, the package is free and MIT-licensed:

👉 npmjs.com/package/@meerathanki09/image-strip-gallery

Feedback, issues, and PRs welcome.