Hardware is expensive; cloud bills are recurring. Efficient resource management isn't just about speed—it's about profitability. Squeezing 20% more performance out of your existing servers is equivalent to getting a 20% discount on your infrastructure bill.
Identifying Bottlenecks
You can't fix what you don't see.
- CPU Bound? Top/Htop shows high user %? Optimize code, use caching, or offload background jobs.
- Memory Bound? Swap usage increasing? Tune application memory limits or hunt for memory leaks.
- I/O Bound? High iowait? Upgrade storage or optimize database queries to read less data.
Tuning the Kernel (Sysctl)
Linux defaults are generic. For high-traffic servers, they are often too conservative.
- Increase open file limits (
ulimit -n) for web servers handling thousands of concurrent connections. - Tune TCP stack parameters (
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse) to handle connection churning efficiently. - Adjust Swappiness (
vm.swappiness) to tell Linux to avoid using slow swap space unless absolutely necessary (set to 10 or 1 for servers).
Caching is King
The fastest request is the one you don't process.
- Application Caching: Use Redis or Memcached to store frequent database query results. Reading from RAM is nanoseconds; reading from disk is milliseconds.
- OpCode Caching: Ensure PHP Opcache is enabled and sized correctly so code doesn't re-compile on every request.
- HTTP Caching: Configure Nginx/Varnish to serve static assets and cacheable pages directly, bypassing the application server entirely.
Process Management
Don't over-provision worker processes. If you have 4 CPU cores, configuring 100 PHP-FPM workers just causes context switching overhead. Tune worker counts to match available CPU resources for maximum throughput.
OptimizationSysAdminPerformance
Share: