Based on the output of ‘free -m’ on a 1GB server and taking into consideration the amount of swap space in use, in the case detailed below, a RAM upgrade was necessary. Required was a minimum of 3GB of RAM multiplied by 2 = 6GB. This ensures that there’s adequate memory available for buffers/cache. This article will […]
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My Blog Entries
MySQL Performance Tuning: Tips, Scripts and Tools
Blog LinuxWith MySQL, common configuration mistakes can cause serious performance problems. In fact, if you mis-configure just one of the many config parameters, it can cripple performance! (see examples) Of course, the performance of MySQL is often tied greatly to the efficiency of your MySQL queries. It’s important to ensure that your performance issues are not […]
How to direct-install Debian SID rolling release using mini.iso (w/ screenshots)
Blog LinuxFor desktop, I’ve always preferred rolling release distros such as Arch Linux or recently Kali Linux. However, currently I’m on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which I rush-installed after an SSD failure last year. Ubuntu recently released 16.04 LTS which means at some point, I’ll need to perform an in-place upgrade or complete re-install to enjoy the newer […]
PHP Performance: Additional CPU cores vs faster CPU cores
Blog LinuxJust over a week ago I received a contact form email detailing slow performance issues with a LAMP (Linux, Apache MySQL, PHP) web server. During the audit phase, I found that the server’s load average was pretty idle. However, the website was indeed very slow. Among a slew of other issues and misconfigurations, one aspect of […]
Panopta (exclusive offer) Get Two Free Months
Blog Linux UpdatesOver the years Panopta has listened to customer feedback and continues to respond with additional development and improvements to their infrastructure, application and network performance monitoring tools. With Panopta you can easily keep an eye on the most fundamental metrics across your complex infrastructure so you can identify the root cause of problems. If you […]
80% of the web powered by PHP
Blog LinuxToday, PHP is used by more than 80% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know. Popular websites such as Facebook, Wikipedia, WordPress.com, Tumblr and this website are all powered by PHP. With such a large share of the web, it may or may not surprise you that more than 90% of PHP based websites […]
Accelerate Time to Value for Log Analytics with the Oracle Management Cloud
Blog Guest Post LinuxGuest post by Philip Brown, Director of Cloud Strategy @ Red Stack Tech. Oracle Management Cloud is the latest innovation from Oracle, a unique on-premise and in cloud suite of monitoring, management and analytics services, meeting the individual needs of each business. This unified suite enables you to improve IT stability, prevent application outages, increase DevOps […]
Linux server performance: Is disk I/O slowing your application?
Blog LinuxIf your Linux server is bogged down, your first step is often to use the TOP command in terminal to check load averages and wisely so. However, there are times when TOP shows very high load averages even with low cpu ‘us’ (user) and high cpu ‘id’ (idle) percentages. This is the case in the video below, load averages […]
Apache Performance: Disable .htaccess
Blog LinuxAbout 3 years ago I wrote a short blog entry about the very basic Apache configuration mistakes and oversights which developers and server admins of the then $500 million dollar Healthcare.gov website made. Most shocking, were elemental oversights, as if devs were not aware of common best practices. Which brings us to another Apache performance related entry. A while […]
Your Web Host Doesn’t Want You To Read This: Benchmark Your VPS
Blog LinuxLast update Nov 2nd 2016: Included quick dd commands to check cached vs uncached disk read performance. There are several Linux benchmarking tools available. However, this article will highlight using the ‘dd’ Unix command for a quick overview and benchmark of your Linux server or VPS. ‘dd’ requires no downloads and can quickly alert you to any […]