This post is the 5th biweekly roundup of noteworthy news articles, blog posts, launches, and other cool Linux-related content that I’ve come across over the past two weeks two months. It has been a heart-wrenching past two months. Sadly, my father died on January 20th, 2021, at the age of 66. Recently, I’ve been catching […]
85% of all Smartphones are powered by Linux
March 15, 2021 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxSmartphones powered by Linux are, for a fact, dominating the smartphone market. A few of you may be scratching your heads at this point. Stop, you’ll go bald. Others are filled with “The Sound of Music” – “The Hills are Alive” kind of Linux pride! Read on, and I’ll provide some pudding, filled with proof […]
Raspberry Pi Performance: Add ZRAM and these Kernel Parameters
March 11, 2021 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxA couple of weeks ago, I published a Pinebook Pro review article on this blog. Similar to the Pinebook Pro, the Raspberry Pi and more recently the Raspberry Pi 4, are also ARM based. I’ve applied some of the optimizations mentioned in that previous article to the Raspberry Pi 4, with good results. I wanted […]
Replacing Cloudflare with CSF Firewall
March 8, 2021 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxMarch 8th, 2021 update: For the past year, this blog has been using Bunny CDN as a full-page caching solution. That said, I still use Cloudflare with other websites. I’m updating this guide with additional details and tips for using CSF (Config Server Firewall) to increase security with [or without] Cloudflare as a reverse proxy. […]
PHP 8 Compatibility Check and Performance Tips.
March 1, 2021 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxPHP 7 was first released back on 03 Dec 2015. Yes, I’m sure, it’s been around a while! The PHP team encouraged upgrading to PHP 7, hailing its improvements such as being twice as fast, consistent 64-bit support, removal of old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions, improved fatal error resistance, to name a few. A […]
Serving your blog from full-page-cache CDN locations
February 28, 2021 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxAsk yourself, if this page didn’t load almost immediately, but instead, there was a blank white page for a few seconds, would you stick around? Around half of web users leave if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load a web page. Two years ago, I used Cloudflare’s Page Rules, specifically the “Cache Everything” […]
PHP Performance: Additional CPU cores vs Faster CPU cores
February 26, 2021 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 webserver). 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 of the […]
pstree command in Linux with examples
February 21, 2021 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxThis pstree command guide is a follow-up of my previous 90 Linux Commands frequently used by Linux Sysadmins article. Every week, or as time allows, I will publish articles on the ~ 90 commands geared toward Linux sysadmins and Linux power users. Let’s continue this series with the pstree command. pstree command and examples […]
What CentOS alternative distro should you choose?
February 17, 2021 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxIn January 2014, CentOS announced it was officially joining with Red Hat while staying independent from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) under a new CentOS governing board. However, in December 2020, Red Hat requisitioned that CentOS terminate the development of CentOS 8. They also announced that support would be shifting to a CentOS alternative rolling-release […]
Linux benchmark scripts and tools
February 15, 2021 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. As a result, I compiled this quick list of scripts and tools for Linux benchmarking. Check each […]
Linux: ncdu and mc to manage large directories
February 15, 2021 by Hayden James, in Blog LinuxCreating, modifying, and deleting files are everyday tasks performed in any operating system, even more so by Sysadmins, Developers, and Programmers. For the most part, these tasks are fast enough when managing a handful of files. However, on Linux and especially with servers, you may at some time have to manage millions or even billions […]