Out-of-memory (OOM) errors take place when the Linux kernel can’t provide enough memory to run all of its user-space processes, causing at least one process to exit without warning. Without a comprehensive monitoring solution, OOM errors can be tricky to diagnose. In this post, you will learn how to diagnose OOM errors in Linux kernels […]
bashtop – the ‘cool’ top alternative.
Meet bashtop, an esthetically pleasing system monitor, written completely in Bash. Yup, you can view all 5000 lines of code, by simply opening /usr/bin/bashtop with a text editor or view on Github. Over the years, the available options for command-line system monitoring tools have grown quite a bit. There is top, htop, glances, nmon, ytop, gtop, vtop, and […]
Apache Performance: Disable .htaccess
A while back, I searched the web for a performance article which I could forward to a client of StackLinux. An article explaining how using WordPress Cache plugins which make use of .htaccess, are almost always slower than plugins that don’t use .htaccess. Surprisingly, that search took a lot longer than expected, until I finally came across this […]
100 Top Server Monitoring & Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solutions
Back in September 2014, I wrote about an article that touched on the subject of server performance monitoring. After this, a reader asked 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 by […]
Disable cron emails (solution)
Cron is a daemon that executes scheduled commands. More specifically, the software utility cron is a time-based job scheduler for Unix-like operating systems, like Linux. Cron can be used to set up jobs to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. Cron is an extremely powerful tool because just about anything that you are able […]
SCP Linux – Securely Copy Files Using SCP examples
This post includes SCP examples. SCP or secure copy allows secure transferring of files between a local host and a remote host or between two remote hosts. It uses the same authentication and security as the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol from which it is based. SCP is loved for it’s simplicity, security and pre-installed availability. SCP […]
MySQL Database Performance: Avoid this common mistake
One frequent topic of support request emails I receive is MySQL database performance. Clients complain about MySQL using too much server memory, too many MySQL slow queries, the famous Mysql server has gone away error and many other MySQL performance related issues. As such, I wanted to quickly share the solution to a common MySQL configuration […]
Home Lab Beginners guide – Hardware
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 […]