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
April 30, 2019 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxSome 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
April 23, 2019 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxLets 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’
April 22, 2019 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxBack 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
April 17, 2019 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxWe 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.
April 9, 2019 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxSometimes 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
April 6, 2019 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxThis 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
April 3, 2019 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxDisclaimer: 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 […]
What to buy for your Raspberry Pi
March 27, 2019 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxUpdated March 27th 2019: Fixed broken manufacture product links and replaced with Amazon links. In another 5 years links will hopefully point to newer models, rather than to broken or discontinued product pages. Article originally posted March 2014. Back in January 2014 I ordered my first Raspberry Pi (Model B revision 2). Very soon I realized […]
Stop trying to overclock the Raspberry Pi 3 B+
February 18, 2019 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxIt’s been a while since I’ve written any Raspberry Pi related posts. Largely because I’ve been using used $200 to $300 Dell Optiplex Micro computers off Ebay. They cost more than a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ but can be custom configured with up to 8GB (3050 model), 16GB or 20GB of fast DDR4 RAM, SATA or NVMe SSDs […]
Linux server performance: Is disk I/O slowing your application?
February 15, 2019 by Hayden James, in 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 […]