Latest "Performance" files
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » Apache

Detect SYN flood slowing down server with netstat

If the web server is slow, detect a SYN flood by netstat -ant | grep :443 | grep SYN_RECV to show the IP addresses leaving it hanging. Hint: If you're behind a reverse proxy, and that shows IP addresses that aren't the proxy's, then your IP is being hit directly. To find out how many IPs are hanging, do netstat -ant | grep :443 | grep SYN_RECV | wc -l. If you do it a few times and the number is increasing, you may be under attack. If it's over 100, that's suspicious, but manageable and the server can usually handle it, especially if you have SYN cookies activated. If it's over 1000, you're under attack.

Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » SQL

SQL query to list all WordPress post revisions for archiving

Here's the SQL query to get all post revisions, which I do prior to cleaning them out of the database, which seems to make it much faster:

SELECT p.*
FROM [posts table name] p
WHERE (p.post_type = 'post' OR p.post_type = 'page') -- Include posts/pages
AND (p.post_date BETWEEN '2020-01-01' AND '2029-07-01') -- Adjust date range
OR (p.post_type = 'revision' AND p.post_parent IN (
SELECT ID FROM [posts table name]
WHERE post_date BETWEEN '2024-01-01' AND '2024-07-01'
));

To get just a count of revisions, change SELECT p.* to SELECT count(*).

Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » rsync & rsnapshot

Speeding up rsnapshot (rsync) backups by removing wildcard paths from exclude

I removed a bunch of wildcard paths from rsnapshot.conf's exclude, and suddenly tonight my backup ran in a few minutes instead of taking over a day like it usually does.

Interesting, I've been looking off and on for at least the better part of a year for ways to lighten the load of rsnapshot's under-the-hood rsync backup commands, which reliably took up about half my CPU power almost continuously, and never found this tip before. You can see, plenty of wildcard paths removed, plus a few other things.

Here's a diff, rsnapshot.conf before changes (<) vs after (>):
< verbose 1
---
> verbose 4
120c120
< loglevel 2
---
> loglevel 4
143a144,146
> rsync_short_args -Wa
> #-W is transfer whole files without prescan, recommended for performance by https://serverfault.com/questions/639458/rsync-taking-100-of-cpu-and-hours-to-complete
> #NOTE: if you set the above short…

Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Troubleshooting log » Web Server

Performance troubleshooting & settings changes 2025aug29

Following several days of frequent freezes, I tried changing the following settings

updated in :

[opcache] original settings
;recommended by https://vpsfix.com/14433/virtualmin-post-installation-configuration-and-server-optimization-guide/
opcache.enable=
opcache.memory_consumption=
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=
opcache.max_accelerated_files=
opcache.validate_timestamps=
opcache.revalidate_freq=
opcache.save_comments=
;end recommendation

to

[opcache]
;recommended by https://vpsfix.com/14433/virtualmin-post-installation-configuration-and-server-optimization-guide/
opcache.enable=
opcache.memory_consumption=
opcache.interned_strings_buffer=
opcache.max_accelerated_files=
opcache.validate_timestamps=
opcache.revalidate_freq=
opcache.save_comments=

-
added var_dump(opcache_get_status()) to php status page to be able to monitor opcache usage

-
changed warning logs from E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED & ~E_STRICT to
----
noticed contained a LOT of processes being stopped for tracing
turned off request_slowlog_timeout by setting to 0s in
had been 4s
---
I had turned on lightspeed at 1:45 am est , aug 26. Seems like more problems since then.

None of the above seem to help, still getting freezes maybe every 30 minutes. Next…

Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » PHP

How to monitor RAM for tuning pm.max_children

How to monitor RAM usage:

  1. free -h:

    • This command shows your system's total, used, and free memory in a human-readable format.
    • Key metrics:
      • total: Total RAM.
      • used: RAM currently in use.
      • free: Unused RAM.
      • buff/cache: RAM used for file system buffers and page cache. This is good; Linux uses free RAM for this and frees it when applications need it.
      • available: The most important metric. This estimates how much memory is available for starting new applications without swapping.
    • Run it before and after: Run free -h before you increase max_children and then after your server has been running for a while under typical load with the new settings. Compare the available memory.
  2. htop (recommended if installed):

    • htop (you might need to sudo…
Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » cron

Add sar logging for CPU, RAM, and disk I/O

Add or change /etc/cron.d/sysstat to this. This creates a cron jobe to write file /tmp/outage_resource_log.txt that keeps minute-by-minute stats, sometimes useful in troubleshooting slowdowns. However, it's not a great way to do things, it create a small, constant resource drag, so disable it when done troubleshooting.

# The first element of the path is a directory where the debian-sa1
# script is located
PATH=/usr/lib/sysstat:/usr/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

# Activity reports every 10 minutes everyday
#ORIGINAL DEFAULT WAS 5-55/10 * * * * root command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1
#uncomment above line and comment out /tmp/outage_resource_log.txt lines to restore original functionality
* * * * * root date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" >> /tmp/outage_resource_log.txt
* * * * * root sar -u 1 1 >> /tmp/outage_resource_log.txt 2>&1
* * * * * root sar -r 1 1 >> /tmp/outage_resource_log.txt 2>&1
* * *…

Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » Apache

View last 200 lines of all access logs on apache server

find [path/to/access/logs/folder] -name "*_access_log" -exec sh -c 'tail -200 "$1" | grep -v "HetrixTools\|ok\.txt\|canary" | sed "s/$/ [$(basename "$1" _access_log)]/"' _ {} \; | sort -k4,4

The grep -v "HetrixTools\|ok\.txt\|canary" filters out hits from my uptime monitor.

Workshop » Reference Section » Grimoires » IT » Platforms » Linux » Packages » fail2ban

How to check Fail2ban log

Command to check fail2ban's log is sudo tail -f /var/log/fail2ban.log

Linux

Linux PHP tuning utilities & commands

1. See memory consumed by php-fpm8.2 (change this to match different PHP version if necessary)

ps --no-headers -o "rss,cmd" -C php-fpm8.2 | awk '{ sum+=$1 } END { printf ("%d%s\n", sum/NR/1024,"M") }'

Linux

Linux SQL Tuning Utilities

1. tuning-primer.sh

Run from Github:
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BMDan/tuning-primer.sh/main/tuning-primer.sh | bash

2. MySQLTuner.pl

wget http://mysqltuner.pl/ -O mysqltuner.pl
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl/master/basic_passwords.txt -O basic_passwords.txt
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/major/MySQLTuner-perl/master/vulnerabilities.csv -O vulnerabilities.csv
perl mysqltuner.pl --host 127.0.0.1 --user [user] --pass [pass]

Remember to quote any punctuation or BASH tokens in the password.