I’ve enabled the Apache server-status functionality on flora. The information provided by this URL may prove useful when trouble-shooting server slowdowns. We’ll be able to see which, if any, requests are taking a large amount of time to process.
Whether or not this will truly prove useful only time will tell, so let me know if you have any thoughts.
One of the benefits of SSH is that you can tunnel communication through the SSH connection to the remote machine. These communications then act as if they are coming from the remote machine. This provides for a means of allowing access to local services without having to open additional ports on the perimeter or host firewalls.
I won’t go into details on how to accomplish this, there are plenty of tutorials out there. I just wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention as an option for server administration.
References
Slow on the draw
Some of our users were complaining of slow performance on one of our web-based utilities. There are, unfortunately, a number of factors that can affect system performance. I haven’t spent much time learning the best practices for profiling a system to discover the source of bottlenecks, but my hunch was that the problem was in MySQL.