Until recently, and for well over the past decade, my wife and I have been nomads. Moving from the Caribbean to Miami, New York, Las Vegas, Vancouver, and now back home. This has meant that for many of those years, my home office basically comprised of a few laptops and screens. These days, we are more […]
atop – For Linux server performance analysis
We’re all familiar with top, a real-time system monitor. Some prefer htop and previously I mentioned iotop for use with storage read/write monitoring. Lets looks at another popular tool for Linux server performance analysis: atop. Advantages of atop Atop is an ASCII full-screen performance monitor which can log and report the activity of all server processes. One feature […]
htop: Quick Guide & Customization
htop is an interactive system-monitor, but also a process-viewer, process-manager, strace tool and more. Sysadmins may opt to use htop in cases where Unix top does not provide enough information about system processes. htop uses a cursor-controlled interface for sending signals to processes. One example where this comes in handy is: you don’t have to type […]
Using CentOS CR (Continuous Release) Repo
CentOS (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 […]
Panopta (exclusive offer) Get Two Free Months
Over the years Panopta has listened to customer feedback; they continue 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 complex infrastructure so you can identify the root cause of problems. If you suffer […]
Finding Linux Compatible Printers
Here’s all the info and links needed to find printers or all-in-one printers that currently support Linux. If you don’t want to spend hours comparing printers, have a look at my recommended Linux compatible printers. Last updated Feb 24th 2020, see Epson ET series below. Last updated Oct 23th 2019, replaced a few printers with their newer models. – […]
25 Best CDN Providers 2020
A content delivery network, also referred to as a content distribution network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of data centers containing proxy servers. CDN Providers serve Internet content, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, etc… closer to and thus faster, to end users. Some of the main advantages […]
Cache Everything (Full Page Cache) to global CDN Locations
Ask 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, more specifically the “Cache everything” […]
Linux Performance: Almost Always Add Swap. Part 2: ZRAM
Previously, we looked at how swap space, particularly swapping, can severely slow down Linux performance. We then tweaked Linux kernel parameters to make better use of server memory and to avoid heavy swapping. That article created some debate and good arguments for and against swap space. For example, if you have more than enough memory […]
100 Top Server & Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solutions
Back in September 2014, I wrote about an article that touched on the subject of server performance monitoring. After which, a reader asked me via LinkedIn: “I am using New Relic to monitor my cloud servers but need an alternative. Any suggestions?” So I wanted to share and expand on my answer to that question […]