We’ve covered top, atop and indirectly due to it’s popularity as top’s alternative… htop (the last screenshot). But are there any others worth looking at? That was the question today in the ask.haydenjames.io Linux forum. This is largely a matter of preference regarding what data is most important to you as it pertains to system healthy […]
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.IO TLD DNS issues and a day without Cloudflare
Blog LinuxYesterday morning, I started receiving down alerts for this blog. Pingdom’s alerts include the message: “Reason: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution”. Right from the start, to simplify troubleshooting, I wrongly removed Cloudflare since I had a similar issue with them a year ago and was able to resolve by temporarily removing. However, upon investigation the issue […]
PHP memory_limit – a *per-script* setting
Blog LinuxWhat happens when your web host blames PHP memory_limit setting for memory usage issues on a Linux web server. This happened recently and although PHP’s memory limit was set to 1GB (very high) that does not mean that scripts were using 1GB. Let’s take a quick look at understanding PHP’s memory_limit setting. PHP memory_limit is a per-script […]
Linux top: Here’s how to customize it
Blog LinuxThe top program provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It can display system summary information as well as a list of processes or threads currently being managed by the Linux kernel. The types of system summary information shown and the types, order and size of information displayed for processes are all user […]
Using CentOS CR (Continuous Release) Repo
Blog LinuxCentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System) is a Linux distribution that attempts to provide free, enterprise-class, community-supported computing platform functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). CentOS is run by volunteers who work directly with Red Hat’s RPM source files and pushing them to CentOS for release. At times the project will fall behind […]
Choosing the Best Linux Distro for Desktop 2018
Blog LinuxSearching for the best Linux distro (distribution)? This article will probably be most useful to those who don’t know what /etc/fstab is used for. Also, this post does not cover Linux server distributions, but instead focuses on Linux desktop distributions. One great way to increase your familiarity with Linux servers is to run Linux on your laptop and/or […]
Strip Down Apache to Improve Performance & Memory Efficiency
Blog LinuxCan you believe that its been 5 years since the release of Apache 2.4?! Still, most Apache based web servers continue to run Apache version 2.2 or even 2.0. This is understandable for the same reasons why Apache web servers are still used more than Nginx… compatibility, official support and features. If you haven’t replaced Apache […]
PHP performance: oPcache Control Panels
Blog LinuxOPcache is a PHP extension which improves PHP performance by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory, thereby removing the need for PHP to load and parse scripts on each request. The extension is built-in for PHP 5.5+ …but, if you are looking to improve PHP performance, the first step should be to use PHP 7+ which […]
50 Top Server Monitoring & Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solutions
Blog LinuxAugust 6th 2017 Update: This list now contains 70 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. Sharing that list publicly was a great way to gain feedback and recommendations on […]
Linux Performance: Why You Should Almost Always Add Swap Space
Blog LinuxWe know that using swap space instead of RAM can severely slow down the performance of Linux. So then, one might ask, since I have more than enough RAM 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 than enough […]