Note: This article serves as an overview and index, connecting you to previous detailed PHP optimization articles. For comprehensive insights on each topic, please follow the provided links to previous articles under the subheadings below. It made more sense to connect these articles here for your convenience, rather than trying to merge 12 articles covering […]
PHP 8 Compatibility Check and Performance Tips
PHP 7 was first released back on 03 Dec 2015. 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, removing old and unsupported SAPIs and extensions, and improved fatal error resistance, to name a few. A few years ago, […]
Are you measuring Linux web server memory usage correctly?
This article was first published in 2014. After which, there was a welcomed change to the Linux kernel in 2016, as mentioned in the 2017 article: Does your Linux server need a RAM upgrade? Let’s check with free, top, vmstat and sar. As a server administrator or web developer, it’s your responsibility to stay informed about […]
innodb_buffer_pool_size – MySQL Performance
In MySQL performance tuning, few variables wield as much influence as innodb_buffer_pool_size. This essential MySQL configuration parameter directly impacts the performance of InnoDB, the most commonly used storage engine in MySQL. In this second installment in our series on MySQL database performance optimization, we continue to delve into the intricate world of MySQL configuration variables by […]
Linux benchmark scripts and tools
This list of Linux benchmark scripts and tools should prove helpful for quick performance checks of CPU, storage, memory, and network on Linux servers and VPS. Check each script before running from the command line. Most of these scripts will benchmark the CPU, memory, storage, and network. In most cases, the CPU Model, frequency, and […]
Your Web Host Doesn’t Want You To Read This: Benchmark Your VPS
Aug 13th, 2023: added Yet-another-bench-script benchmarking tool. Sept 27th, 2021: Added link to a great list of command-line benckmark scripts. June 17th, 2019: Added instructions for network speed test using speedtest-cli script. Nov 2nd, 2016: Included quick dd commands to check cached vs. uncached read performance. This article will highlight using the ‘dd’ Unix command […]
NGINX Reverse Proxy Metrics to Monitor
NGINX is one of the most popular web servers nowadays, especially for Linux web servers. According to nginx.com, it powers more than 400 million websites. It is, however, probably even more commonly used as a reverse proxy. Since it acts as a go-between for your application and your users, it’s important to properly monitor NGINX […]
100 Top Observability Tools (+ Server Monitoring and APM solutions)
Looking for application monitoring and observability solutions? On this page, I’ve listed the top application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, and observability solutions to date. The listings are updated periodically as APM and observability solutions continue a rapid evolution. While I haven’t tested all of these solutions, I’ve used more than a third of them. […]
Serving your blog from full-page-cache CDN locations
Ask yourself, would you stick around if this page didn’t load almost immediately, but instead, there was a blank white page for a few seconds? Around half of the internet’s users leave if it takes longer than 2 seconds to load a web page. Two years ago, I used Cloudflare’s Page Rules, specifically the “Cache […]
78% of the web powered by PHP (3% on PHP 8)
Today, PHP is used by almost 78% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know. Popular websites such as Slack, Etsy, Wikipedia, WordPress, Mailchimp, Canva, Indeed, Investing.com, and others are powered by PHP. However, in the coming months, many websites that fail to upgrade to the latest version of PHP 8 will be […]