Swap space can be used as an "overflow" area for your system when you run out of RAM. The operating system can store data that would normally be kept in RAM on the hard drive in a specially formatted file. In this g...

An introduction to basic load balancing concepts and terminology, using HAProxy, with some examples.

Nginx is a fast and lightweight alternative to the sometimes overbearing Apache 2. However, Nginx just like any kind of server or software must be tuned to help attain optimal performance. Here's how to optimize Ngin...

PHP is a server side scripting language used by many popular CMS and blog platforms like WordPress and Drupal. It is also part of the popular LAMP and LEMP stacks. Updating the PHP configuration settings is a common t...

In this tutorial, we will go over how to use Apache JMeter to perform basic load and stress testing on your web application environment. We will show you how to use the graphical user interface to build a test plan an...

One of the easiest ways to make your server more responsive, and guard against out-of-memory errors in your application, is to add some swap space. This gives you the ability to increase the amount of information that...

Once your application is up and running in a cloud server environment, you may be wondering how you can improve your server environment to make the leap from "it works" to a full-fledged production environment. This a...

Rsyslog, Elasticsearch, and Logstash provide the tools to transmit, transform, and store your log data. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a centralized rsyslog server to store log files from multiple syst...

Memcached is an in-memory key-value cache that can be used to temporarily cache frequently requested data on websites. In this guide, we will demonstrate how to install and use memcached on an Ubuntu 14.04 server.

ProxySQL is a SQL-aware proxy server that can be positioned between your application and your database to create a caching layer to optimize MySQL queries. In this tutorial, you will use ProxySQL to set up transparent...

Apache is an amazingly powerful and capable web server. In order to make initial setup as easy as possible, it comes with numerous modules pre-installed. This makes it a great choice for new projects when you need to ...

This article covers how to set up a simple load balancer on a DigitalOcean droplet with nginx. The tutorial covers setting up a round robin loadbalancer that can then direct site visitors to one of a set of IPs

WordPress is a popular and powerful CMS (content management system) platform. Its popularity can bring unwanted attention in the form of malicious traffic specially targeted at a WordPress site. There are many instanc...

HAProxy is an open source software which can load balance HTTP and TCP servers. In the previous article on HAProxy we configured load balancing for HTTP and in this one we'll do the same for MySQL. All your MySQL serv...

This article will cover the pros and cons of using virtual memory or a swap file (paging), determining if your droplet already uses virtual memory or paging, the differences between a swap partition and a swap file, i...

Apache can be configured to log a large quantity of information to help you diagnose problems and keep an eye on activity. In this guide, we will discuss how Apache handles logging and how you can create your own cus...

In this tutorial, we will teach you how to set up and use the Apache JMeter HTTP(S) Test Script Recorder to record HTTP requests. Recording HTTP requests is a great way to building test plans, and can be useful in cre...

Understanding the logging mechanisms of your server will help you diagnose problems and avoid larger problems down the road. In this article, we will explore Nginx's logging capabilities. We will discuss the configu...

Intelligent content caching is one of the most effective ways to improve the experience for your site's visitors. Caching, or temporarily storing content from previous requests, is part of the core content delivery st...

Here's how to setup FastCGI caching with Nginx on your VPS.