Over the last few months I’ve started enabling PHP realpath_cache_size and realpath_cache_ttl for the performance benefits. At the time I followed the settings I found here. It bugged me that I was blindly setting the size of the cache without actually know what and how much storage was being used. In this post I will show you […]
Archive | Blog
My Blog Entries
Best WordPress Cache Plugin: Cachify
This blog post was originally posted just over 2 years ago. WordPress Cache plugin options have changed a lot since then. As such, I’m updating this list of 5 best WordPress plugins. Three of the five listed have been replaced! Are you already using a Wordpress Cache Plugin? I’ve tried many WordPress caching plugins over the years and after much testing, I’m able […]
50 Top Server Monitoring & Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solutions
Back in 2014, I compiled a list of the top 20 server performance monitoring solutions. Largely because I already had a list saved locally for my own reference. Posting that list publicly was a great way to gain feedback and recommendations on other tools available. In fact, most of the companies listed below were not included in my initial top 20 list. […]
Avoid This When Tuning MySQL Query Cache for Performance
One of the most misconfigured MySQL performance features, is MySQL Query Cache Size. Just last month I was optimizing a web server with 32 gigabytes of RAM where the existing config had MySQL’s query cache size set to 4 gigabytes. The thought behind it seems to be that more is better. Since the server has free RAM available, setting MySQL Query […]
Tuning MySQL: my.cnf, avoid this common pitfall!
Caution: Don’t overwrite your entire my.cnf at once when tuning MySQL. One or two changes per restart, benchmark, then continue. Take backups first and be careful! It took me some time to decide the title for this article. MariaDB has been fast replacing MySQL as a growing number of Linux distributions now default to MariaDB over MySQL. In […]
APM Showdown: Which APM tool is right for you?
Guest post by Anand Akela, Director of Product Marketing, AppDynamics. In an ever-increasing digital world, IT Operations teams are struggling to monitor their application landscapes and third-party dependencies. A major key in their toolbelts is an application performance monitoring (APM) solution, which can provide business and user context and correlation to their application performance. Choosing the […]
Server Density: Ops are not machines. Introducing HumanOps
Guest post by Max Zahariadis, Content Lead at Server Density. Sysadmins are not superhumans. They grow tired and get stressed just like everybody else. We all know that sustained stress is detrimental to health. We also know that fatigue impairs our ability for basic problem solving. So the question is: how do you prevent stress and […]
How to strip down Amazon Linux EC2 to maximize available RAM
Firstly, this article mainly applies to low memory Amazon Linux EC2 instance types such as t2.nano and t2.micro. The instructions below are also specific to Amazon Linux AMI, which like CentOS, is based on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Yum! Update all packages – yum package manager First, login to your new Amazon Linux EC2 instance […]
Use atop for Linux server performance analysis, here’s why.
Why use atop? We’re all familiar with top, a real-time system monitor. Some prefer htop and recently I mentioned iotop but for disk read/write monitoring. Today, I wanted to highlight another popular tool for Linux server performance analysis… atop. Atop is a ASCII full-screen performance monitor which can log and report the activity of all server processes. One feature I […]
Raspberry Pi 3 Overclock and Turbo Config
It’s that time again. You may remember my old overclocking post for Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi 2. Yes, still obsessed with performance.This Raspberry Pi 3 Overclock post seeks to overclock the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Squeezing out some extra performance without compromising stability. It’s highly recommended that you use a capable power supply with 2.5 amps […]