Africa's Open/Free Source Software

Excellent tool to save bandwidth is Rsync. It's available on most flavors of Linux. This tool can save huge amount of bandwidth when older version of file is present on your system. The magic is achieved by sending only changed blocks in source file. Rsync algorithm is smart enough to search for data blocks that match checksum in any position of target file. Useful options are

-z to compress data
-B to use smaller data blocks
-v for verbose output

I have been using MySQL for over 2 years now. Started with version 3 and now using 5 on Linux.
MySQL is very flexible database with many features which help optimize application performance. My favorite is memory (heap) tables. Basically you create memory table which can have indexes and can be populated with SELECT statement. Memory access is much faster than disk I/O and with many table scans performance is much improved

If you need to see network traffic on your server in real time then try iftop. It works similar to Linux top command. If you're using Fedora then simply type

yum install iftop

I love yum, so easy to install, no more dependency hell

On busy website MySQL database tables will get fragmented. Schedule the following command via cron to be run daily when server is idle:

mysqlcheck -ppassword -Avor

Our new dedicated domain name is http://linux-south-africa.co.za/