October 26, 2026 · StackPioneer
Adding a second web server to a legacy PHP app is mostly not a load-balancer problem. Sessions on local disk, uploads in the document root, cron running twice, and caches that only clear on one node — here is how to find each one and fix it without a rewrite.
Read moreSeptember 28, 2026 · StackPioneer
Automated traffic now outnumbers humans on a lot of older PHP sites. Here is how to measure it from Apache logs, separate the crawlers you want from the ones you do not, and cut the load with rate limits, caching, and a few Apache rules — before buying a bigger server.
Read moreSeptember 21, 2026 · StackPioneer
Deploying by rsync or FTP into the live document root means every visitor during the copy sees a half-updated application. Symlinked release directories, a deliberate OPcache reset, and migrations split from code deploys fix that in an afternoon — no pipeline rewrite required.
Read moreSeptember 16, 2026 · StackPioneer
ALTER TABLE on a large InnoDB table is the migration that takes the site down at 2 a.m. Here is how to tell which changes are instant in MySQL 8, when to reach for pt-online-schema-change or gh-ost, and how to rehearse either one.
Read moreSeptember 15, 2026 · StackPioneer
TLS 1.0/1.1 off, an honest cipher list, HSTS you can roll back, security headers that do not break the admin, mod_status and .git left exposed, and renewals that fail loudly instead of silently.
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 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.
Read more