Tag: Performance

  • Keeping your SSH session alive

    We’re working on servers all day everyday, mostly by SSH. This can be annoying when you switch tabs and then want to go back to another and its timed you out and dead. A nice quick shortcut to kill that session is to type in ‘~.’ This needs to be on a new line so…

  • Bandwidth useage and control – mod_deflate

    I’ve seen a few times clients with lots of web traffic struggling, and in some cases they had some advance stuff like load-balancing and memcached, and they didn’t even have compressed html! To me is puzzling that many people don’t have it when it takes a couple lines of code and saves typically a good…

  • Glassfish Installation Script

    We do a lot of Java hosting for our customers. As with any technology, there are a lot of different deployment scenarios to choose from. With Java we tend to see mostly Tomcat hosting because most folks don’t require a full fledged application server (and the associated memory costs that come along with it). JBoss…

  • Dallas networking improvements

    This is a heads up about some networking improvements (at Dallas) we will be making over the weekend. In Dallas we take a network feed from our upstream providers.  That feeds into our ‘core’ networking gear.  And we distribute it from that core gear to the cabinets we operate in Dallas.  The core gear is…

  • 32bit or 64bit – Choose Your VPS Kernel

    Sometimes we roll out new features in our control panel without announcing them.  We usually do this so that we see a trickle of new users initially which helps identify any bugs or missing functionality before the entire userbase starts hammering the new features.  :) Selecting your VPS kernel bit-edness (32bit or 64bit) is one…

  • apache modules to help keep your system steady

    libapache2-mod-bw – bandwidth limiting module This module allows you to limit bandwidth usage on every virtual host or directory or to restrict the number of simultaneous connections. The bandwidth control, for example, can be configured according to the criteria: origin of the connection, file extension, file size or user agent of the client. Example: LoadModule…

  • Is your VPS slow to login at all? Applications not running so fast?

    Often we will get customers emailing in saying that things are just running ‘slow’. Often when we login the first thing we notice is after the password has gone through it just hangs for a fair while before login. This is usually a sign that its trying to do a reverse DNS lookup and failing.…

  • David’s Handy Scripts – bandwidth usage – disk usage

    I thought a useful addition to our blog might be a running series of handy scripts.  Just for the sake of things (and because I couldn’t find a better title), I’m calling the series “David’s Handy Scripts”.  I’ll get this show on the road with a quick script I put together to track 2 things…