How does middleware priority and ordering affect application behavior when multiple middleware, such as authentication and rate limiting, are applied to the same route together?

The order in which middleware executes can significantly affect application behavior, such as whether a rate limiting check happens before or after an expensive authentication database lookup, and most frameworks let you explicitly control middleware priority or execution order, which is an important consideration since applying middleware in a suboptimal order could mean performing unnecessary expensive work, such as running a full authentication check, before a much cheaper rate limit check that might have rejected the request immediately without needing that expensive work at all.

// Explicit middleware priority configuration
protected $middlewarePriority = [
    ThrottleRequests::class,
    Authenticate::class,
];