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 […]
Tag Archives: sysadmins
.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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Does your Linux server need a RAM upgrade? Lets check with free, top, vmstat and sar.
Blog LinuxBased on the output of ‘free -m’ on a 1GB VPS and taking into consideration the amount of swap space in use – details 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. There’s This article will walk you though […]
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 […]
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 […]