Server monitoring is a big part of running a solid web site.  As an admin, you must know what is going on your server.  One of the tools most Linux/Unix admins are used to is called “top”.  “top” by itself is a very powerful tool.  Here is a quick guide on how to read output [...]

One of the things people tend to forget is the ability for web servers to compress content before sending it back to client. Client’s browser then uncompresses the data and displays it to the user. Pretty much all of the recent browsers support gzip compression. In this post, I will go over [...]

Ramdisk is very good to have if you want something to stay in memory.   Files in memory makes it so you can access them with out having to access hard drive all the time.  Perfect candidates would be things which do not change eg. web images or downloadable files, etc.  If you have Linux Kernel [...]

We were having issues with mysql threads where they would be in sleep mode and wouldn’t die off for long time. At the same time we started having issues with our servers where the load will spike and eventually server will come to halt unless we killed all the apache processes and restarted apache [...]

I have been asked numerous times what does “load average” means in top. If you don’t know what top is and you have access to linux machine, go type top now and see what it shows.
load average: 2.05, 2.17, 1.93
Quick answer is: first number (2.05) is 1 minute avg, second number (2.17) is [...]