Field notes from keeping LAMP systems healthy.
September 11, 2026
MySQL 8.0 reaches end of life in April 2026 and 8.4 LTS is the successor. What actually breaks — mysql_native_password, removed replication options, retired variables — and how to rehearse the upgrade on a replica.
Read moreSeptember 10, 2026
PHP 8.1 and MySQL 5.7 are out of security support, and CentOS 7 and Ubuntu 20.04 followed them. Here are the commands that turn "we think we're patched" into a dated inventory with a remediation order.
Read moreAugust 11, 2026
pm.max_children from measured worker memory, timeouts that fail cleanly, slowlogs that name the bottleneck, and a load test that maps your actual ceiling — tuning from numbers, not blog-post folklore.
Read moreJuly 21, 2026
A backup you have never restored is a hope. A monthly drill — restore, verify, boot the app, write it down — catches missing routines, charset mangling, and silent cron failures before the incident does.
Read moreJune 16, 2026
Most LAMP performance problems are a missing cache at one of three layers — opcode, application, HTTP — or a cache someone believes is working and is not. The wins that take hours, not weeks.
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