Performance Tuning

Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling: A Framework for VPS and Shared Hosting Providers

Your hosting business is growing rapidly, and you’re starting to feel the pressure of accommodating an increasing number of clients on your dedicated servers. It’s a good problem to have — but still a problem. It’s a common challenge faced by many VPS and cPanel shared hosting providers, and it begs the question: how do

What is a good ping? Why ping speed matters for websites and gaming

Have you ever had a website load slowly, been in a game that’s lagging, or have a skype call turn robotic? One of the main causes of this is excessive latency. As latency is commonly measured with the “ping” command, this latency is often called your “ping time”. This latency measures the time it takes

Swap Memory in Linux: What is “Swap Space” exactly?

Most sysadmins will have at least some familiarity with the idea of swap memory. However, even if you have come across it before, you might not know exactly what swap is, what it does, or how it works. In today’s article, we’ll be talking about swap memory in more detail to explain why it’s important

How to use MTR – A Guide For Windows, Mac, and Linux

One of the most important aspects of an internet connected system is the stability of the network. There are a number of tools to diagnose, troubleshoot, and verify network performance and connectivity. Today we’re going to be discussing one of the most important of those: MTR. In this article, we will address some important topics:

What is All Cores Turbo? Base Clock, Max Turbo, and All Cores Turbo explained!

In the server hosting industry, one of the most confusing hardware performance statistics we are faced with is CPU ‘core performance’, a metric that is advertised differently by just about every manufacturer, which makes it about as easy to understand as string theory, algebra or if pineapple belongs on pizza!   For today’s blog entry, we

Linux Bridge vs OpenVSwitch — How to Improve Virtualization Network Performance

How to fix packet loss and latency in high bandwidth VPS servers by upgrading to OpenVSwitch Virtualization is one of the most pervasive and transformational technologies in the hosting world to have come along in the last decade. Despite this, maintaining the efficient operation of virtual machines is not always easy. In this article, we’ll

Testing the network speed of your IOFLOOD.com server with iperf

With 10gbps and faster network ports becoming more common all the time, it is becoming increasingly important to make sure that a server can actually use all of that bandwidth. At these high speeds, many things can go wrong that limit your performance to less than the maximum speed of the port. The most important

Optimal RAID Stripe Size and filesystem Readahead for RAID-10?

What RAID stripe size is ideal for an array of hard drives? What are the default settings for both raid stripe size and filesystem readahead? Are those defaults acceptable? How do these settings impact the performance of my server? In this post, we’ll go into detail as to what settings are ideal for a server

IOWAIT in Linux — is iowait too high?

High IOWAIT can be a real problem in linux, making your server grind to a halt. The question is, how high is too high? When should I be concerned? Firstly, we’ll talk about what IOWAIT means, discuss related statistics and how to interpret them, and finally how to decide if IOWAIT is causing a problem.

What is Apache Keepalive Timeout? How to optimize this critical setting.

If you’ve struggled to fix web server slowdowns or crashes, you may have come across a setting for Apache called “Keep-Alive”. This is one of the most powerful — and frequently misused — features of apache. In this article, we’ll explain: What is Apache Keepalive / Keepalive Timeout? What configuration is optimal for best server