A content delivery network, also referred to as a content distribution network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of data centers containing proxy servers. CDN Providers serve Internet content, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, etc… closer to and thus faster, to end users. Some of the main advantages […]
Blog Entries
100 Server and Application Performance Monitoring Tools 2019
Last Updated: May 8th 2019. November 29th 2018 – Site24x7 replaces Coscale. Coscale was recently acquired by New Relic. Oct 11th 2018 update: 100+ – Fixed 11 broken links. (including defunct, mergers, acquisitions, or changed links) December 1st 2017 update: 70 100 Top Server Monitoring & Application Performance Monitoring Tools. August 6th 2017 update: 50 70 Top Server Monitoring & Application Performance Monitoring […]
20 Top Server Monitoring & Application Performance Monitoring Solutions
UPDATE: 50 Top Server Monitoring & Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solutions Last Updated May 8th 2019 – Fixed broken links. (including defunct, mergers, acquisitions, or changed links) Back in September I wrote about an article than touched on the subject of server performance monitoring. Then just last month a LinkedIn connection asked: “I am using New Relic to […]
PHP Performance: Additional CPU cores or Faster CPU cores
Some time ago I received an email from a client experiencing slow performance issues with a LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL and PHP web server). During a full audit, I found that the server’s load average was pretty low (see above screenshot). However, the website was indeed very slow. There were some misconfigurations, but one […]
PHP-FPM tuning: Using ‘pm static’ for max performance
Lets take a very quick look at how best to setup PHP-FPM for high throughput, low latency and a more stable use of CPU and memory. By default, most setups have PHP-FPM’s PM (process manager) string set to dynamic and there’s also the common advice to use ondemand if you suffer from available memory issues. However, lets compare the two management […]
Set PHP realpath_cache_size ‘correctly’
Back in 2012 I started enabling PHP realpath_cache_size and realpath_cache_ttl for the performance benefits. At the time, I followed settings I found here (has since been deleted). It bugged me that I was blindly setting the size of the cache without actually knowing how much storage was being used. In this post I will show you how to […]
Linux Performance: Why You Should Almost Always Add Swap Space
We know that using swap space instead of RAM (memory) can severely slow down the performance of Linux. So then, one might ask, since I have more than enough memory available, wouldn’t it better to remove swap space completely? The short answer is, No. There are performance benefits when swap is enabled, even when you have more […]
Linux server needs a RAM upgrade? Check with top, free, vmstat and sar.
Sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge knowing if and when you should upgrade the RAM (random access memory) on your Linux server. Even more so when deciding how much memory you should add, or, if you have adequate memory, how do you make best use of it? This article will walk you […]
Linux benchmark scripts and tools
This list of Linux benchmark scripts and tools should prove useful for quick performance check of CPU, storage, memory and network on Linux servers and VPS. Recently, I used a Linux benchmark script which was no longer maintained by the. As a result, I compiled this quick list of scripts and tools for Linux benchmarking. […]
Quick Tips for a more stable Arch Linux experience
Disclaimer: Everything below has been published previously online in the Arch’s extensive wiki. However, for what ever reason there’s still a lot of misinformation about Arch’s stability and many users are not aware that these published tips exist. This short article aims to raise awareness on the best paths for a more stable Arch Linux experience. That’s not […]