Tag: Processes

Introduction

Zabbix is an open-sourced tool used to monitor various IT components such as servers and hardware that they are running, cloud services, whole networks, etc. Zabbix can monitor the network health and integrity of your servers. All monitoring can be done through Zabbix’s web-based frontend. This means that you can quickly check the status of your servers from anywhere! This article describes how to install the Zabbix monitoring tool, create a database, and configure the frontend on Ubuntu 20.04.

Introduction

In this second tutorial on server load, we outline the steps that should be taken when investigating where server load originates and what may be causing your server to become overloaded. As noted in Part 1 of our series, excessive use of any apps or services can typically cause load issues. Here are the four main areas of concern:

Introduction

In this two-part series, we outline the steps to take when investigating where server load originates or causing your server to become overloaded. When running a server that hosts multiple websites, high load issues often crop up. To find out how and why this occurs, read on. 

As you are probably already aware, everything is considered to be a file in Linux. That includes hardware devices, processes, directories, regular files, sockets, links, and so on. Generally, the file system is divided into data blocks and inodes. With that being said, you can think about inodes as a basis of the Linux file system. To explain it more clearly, an Inode is a data structure that stores metadata about every single file on your computer system. 

INXI is one of the best tools that offer a straightforward and comprehensive method for obtaining a wealth of information about a server with a single command.

In our last tutorial, we showed you how to install Apache’s mod_fcgid and provided Linux scripts to assist in transitioning from mod_php. In this next section, we’ll be discussing how to configure a baseline setting for PHP optimization.

When it comes to PHP execution, mod_fcgid (also called FCGI) is one of the heavyweight contenders. There are a few rival handlers, like PHP-FPM or mod_lsapi, which come close to matching its execution speed, but they generally leave something to be desired when it comes to fine-tuning and resource consumption. FCGI is built for speed and includes a myriad of Apache directives that can be leveraged for resource regulation.

What Does Server Load Mean?

Checking a server’s load allows us to evaluate server resources and confirm they are sufficient for any running application. It enables us to troubleshoot slow performance and reliably pinpoint any server resource that may need attention.

The command line terminal, or shell on your Linux server, is a potent tool for deciphering activity on the server, performing operations, or making system changes. But with several thousand executable binaries installed by default, what tools are useful, and how should you use them safely?

Sometimes you may find your server in a state of high load caused by out control of processes. First you’ll want to use a command like htop, top, or ps, to get an idea on the server’s current state. If you aren’t familiar with those utilities we’d suggest checking our our article on htop.