Apache – the technology that powers the web. I’m not sure if that is correct, but I think that we wouldn’t see the world wide web in its current shape without it. Launched in 1995 and since April 1996, it has been the most popular web server around the world. Because of handling your users’ requests, Apache serves as the front application. It is crucial to understand what your server is doing, what file users are accessing, from where they came, and much, much more.

NGINX is a popular web server featuring a wide range of capabilities, including reverse proxy, mail proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancing. It offers TLS offloading and a health check of the backends and supports gRPC, WebSocket, and HTTP/2. In short, NGINX is a one-stop solution for most of your web server needs. When using NGINX, monitoring its metrics is crucial for tackling issues.

Linux is one of the most popular operating systems today, powering a large portion of the Internet. According to W3Techs, almost half of today’s top-ranked 1 million websites currently run on Linux systems. So, if you want your site—and the application(s) running on it—to be high-performing with lots of uptime, you need to ensure the availability and reliability of your Linux-based servers.

Apache Cassandra is a distributed database known for its high availability, fault tolerance, and near-linear scaling. It was initially developed by Facebook, but it is a widely used open-source system used by the largest tech companies in the world. There are numerous reasons behind its popularity, including no single point of failure, exceptional horizontal scaling with a data layout designed as a perfect fit for time-series data.

As developers, we would like our users to interact with applications that run smoothly and without issues. We want the libraries that we create to be widely adopted and successful. All of that will not happen without the code that handles errors. Java exception handling is often a significant part of the application code. You might use conditionals to handle cases where you expect a certain state and want to avoid erroneous execution – for example, division by zero.

So you finally launched your service worldwide, great! The next thing you’ll see is thousands and thousands of people flooding into your amazing website from all corners of the world expecting to have the same experience regardless of their location. Here is where things get tricky. Having an infrastructure that will support the expansion of your service across the globe without sacrificing user experience is going to be real though as distance will introduce latency.

The Apache HTTP Server (httpd) is a widely used, open-source web server application. Because you can easily customize it through modules, it has become the go-to choice of both individuals powering their personal blogs and enterprises running high-traffic websites and web apps. It’s a well-known fact that with high traffic, the performance of Apache web servers can take a hit, experiencing bottlenecks as your traffic scales up, which will lead to delayed responses.

PostgreSQL is a popular open-source, object-relational database. As with any other data storage solution, capturing metrics is crucial for making sure your database is reliable, available, and performing optimally. This will help you dig deeper into database performance problems, do performance tuning, optimize queries and indexes, and make partitioning decisions. But that’s not all. You’ll also be able to set up alerts and plan for failures or upgrades.

In today’s digital world, everything comes down to speed. It doesn’t matter if you have the most complex and good-looking site if it takes forever to load. There are various reasons why your web pages may load slowly, but no matter the cause, today I’m going to show you some useful tips and techniques on how to improve your website performance and speedand ensure a smooth user experience. But first things first.

Monitoring is crucial if you want to see what happens in your system and JVM-based applications are not different. Well, some metrics, like memory and garbage collection, require special attention because they play a major role in your application performance. In this blog post, we will look into the key Java Virtual Machine (JVM) metrics that you should monitor if you care about performance and stability. Those are the memory, the garbage collection, and the JVM threads.