PHP 8.4 shipped in November 2024 and is now the default on Ubuntu 24.04 repositories and most 2026 managed images. The question for anyone running a small VPS is concrete:…

When a page takes 1.8 seconds and CPU sits at 40 percent, the problem is not capacity — it is latency somewhere in the request path. Guessing at it means…

Two kernel memory features are enabled by default on most Linux distributions and quietly change latency characteristics in opposite directions. Transparent Hugepages (THP) reduces TLB misses by backing memory with…

A concrete memory budget for running MySQL or MariaDB on a 1–2 GB VPS: which buffers to shrink, which to leave alone, and how to verify the reduction on a live server.

Why a load average of 8 can be harmless on an 8-core VPS and a load of 1.5 can be catastrophic on a 2-core one — and the metrics that tell you which situation you are in.

A MySQL or MariaDB server that swaps, gets OOM-killed, or refuses new connections is almost always misconfigured for the memory it has — not short of memory. On a 1…

A step-by-step method for isolating disk I/O latency spikes on a VPS: measure the right metrics, separate write and read pressure, and fix the actual bottleneck.

The default MySQL configuration on most VPS images allocates `128M` to the InnoDB buffer pool. On a 1 GB instance running WordPress, that leaves roughly 700 MB of RAM idle…

By default, Nginx opens a brand-new TCP connection to every upstream (PHP-FPM, Node, Gunicorn, or a second Nginx) for every proxied request, then closes it. At 500 requests per second…

A practical look at Linux page cache behaviour on 1–2 GB VPS instances: how dirty pages, reclaim pressure, and drop_caches really work, and what to measure before adding RAM.