PUBLIC MARKS with tags configuration & application

MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that will assist you with your MySQL configuration and make recommendations for increased performance and stability. Within seconds, it will display statistics about your MySQL installation and the areas where it can be improved. It’s key to remember that MySQLTuner is a script which can assist you with your server, but it is not the solution to a badly performing MySQL server. The best performance gains come from a thorough review of the queries sent to the server, and an evaluation of the MySQL server itself. A qualified developer in your application’s programming or scripting language should be able to work with a MySQL database administrator to find improvements for your server. Once the server and application are optimized well, you may need to consider hardware upgrades to the physical server itself. This is a really useful tool for helping to optimize MySQL performance.Understanding the various my.cnf variables and how they affect performance can seem really complicated but this tool takes some of the pain away and makes it easier to understand the effects of each variable.It is especially useful to be able to see the global memory usage, memory usage per thread and the maximum possible memory usage - that is really valuable information that is otherwise complex to calculate.

Opsview is enterprise network and application monitoring software designed for scalability, flexibility and ease of use. Opsview has been in development since 2003 and is released under the GNU GPL license. Current version is 2.12. Opsview is a fully integrated monitoring tool that incorporates popular Open Source software including Nagios, Net-SNMP and RRDtool. The Catalyst web framework provides an extensible monitoring and configuration user interface. Opsview software is supported on Linux (Debian, CentOS, RHEL and Ubuntu) and Solaris 10. It will monitor all common operating systems including Windows. Opsview extends the capabilities of Nagios in the following ways: * Distributed monitoring with high availability and fail-over * Much improved SNMP support with trap processing with rules engine * API supporting automation of Opsview configuration * Data warehouse for storage of historical performance and event data * Opsview Reports customisable reporting * Powerful configuration and management UI * Extended monitoring UI * Extensible architecture based on Catalyst Web Framework and Altinity middleware software

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy and heartbeat on Debian Etch. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content. Not only does the load balancer distribute the requests to the two backend Apache servers, it also checks the health of the backend servers. If one of them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the remaining backend server. In addition to that, the two load balancer nodes monitor each other using heartbeat, and if the master fails, the slave becomes the master, which means the users will not notice any disruption of the service. HAProxy is session-aware, which means you can use it with any web application that makes use of sessions (such as forums, shopping carts, etc.). From the HAProxy web site: "HAProxy is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly suited for web sites crawling under very high loads while needing persistence or Layer7 processing. Supporting tens of thousands of connections is clearly realistic with todays hardware. Its mode of operation makes its integration into existing architectures very easy and riskless, while still offering the possibility not to expose fragile web servers to the Net."

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with Pound and keepalived on Debian Etch. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content. Not only does the load balancer distribute the requests to the two backend Apache servers, it also checks the health of the backend servers. If one of them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the remaining backend server. In addition to that, the two load balancer nodes monitor each other using keepalived, and if the master fails, the slave becomes the master, which means the users will not notice any disruption of the service. Pound is session-aware, which means you can use it with any web application that makes use of sessions (such as forums, shopping carts, etc.).

NagiosVMA is virtual machine appliance that runs Nagios, a powerful, open-source application which performs host, service and network monitoring. Additionally, the appliance was enhanced with Groundwork Monitor Architect, an open-source, web-based, configuration tool for Nagios. It is intended to offer the end-user sophisticated network monitoring in minutes, instead of hours, (or even days) as is typical with building and configuring a Linux/Nagios host. Using Nagios combined with Monarch and Monarch's automatic host discovery feature, this virtual machine appliance can be booted, configured, and ready to monitor your network in as little as 10 minutes. (in fact, as soon as it boots, its already monitoring this virtual machine appliance!)

Applications using the LAMP (Linux®, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) architecture are constantly being developed and deployed. But often the server administrator has little control over the application itself because it's written by someone else. This series of three articles discusses many of the server configuration items that can make or break an application's performance. This second article focuses on steps you can take to optimize Apache and PHP. Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl) form the basis of the LAMP architecture for Web applications. Many open source packages based on LAMP components are available to solve a variety of problems. As the load on an application increases, the bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure become more apparent in the form of slow response to user requests. The previous article showed you how to tune the Linux system and covered the basics of LAMP and performance measurement. This article focuses on the Web server components, Apache and PHP.