TL;DR / Summary: A privacy-friendly analytics tool on a VPS needs almost no resources, but it does need a retention policy. Left alone, a visit table grows until the disk…

Multi-generational LRU, merged into the mainline kernel in 6.1, replaced a page-reclaim design that had gone largely unchanged since the early 2000s. The difference is architectural rather than incremental: instead…

Swap on a VPS has a bad reputation, and on spinning disks or network-attached storage that reputation is deserved. Compressed swap changes the arithmetic entirely: instead of writing evicted anonymous…

Public IPv4 addresses are the line item that quietly doubles the price of a small VPS. Some providers charge four to eight dollars per month for a dedicated address, which…

Mosquitto handles a surprising number of MQTT connections for a small process, but the limit that bites operators is rarely the broker itself. It is file descriptors, TLS handshake CPU,…

Steal time is the one CPU metric on a VPS that describes something you cannot fix from inside the guest. It counts the cycles during which your vCPU was runnable…

A single-vCPU VPS can be perfectly healthy by every CPU metric and still drop packets under load. The usual cause is that the receive path is processed by softirqs on…

A web application started with nohup python app.py & is not a service. It does not restart after a crash, it does not survive a reboot, it writes logs to…

Ext4 has been the default Linux filesystem for long enough that most administrators never choose it — they inherit it from the installer and stop thinking about it. On a…

A load average of 12 on a 4 vCPU box should mean everything is crawling. Sometimes it does, and sometimes the box serves requests in 40 ms while uptime reports…