This article shows you how to use a little-known InnoDB feature to find out what is holding the lock for which an InnoDB transaction is waiting. I then show you how to use an undocumented feature to make this even easier with innotop.

Sensu is an open source cloud monitoring framework, purpose built for the cloud. Framework includes monitoring server, platform-independent agent, and web-based dashboard.

Excellent description by Adrian Cockcroft of how Amazon EBS works from a performance perspective, with a focus on multi-tenancy at the VM host, local disk and EBS disk levels.

GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems. It provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual server report on the fly.

GoAccess can parse both of Apaches' log formats, the Common Log Format (CLF) and the Combined Log Format (XLF/ELF), including virtual host. It is possible to parse Nginx as well. (if configured with the standard Apache log format)

Great example showing how to access the filesystem[s] on a xen disk image, or any other disk image which represents a drive containing partitions.

Reasonably in-depth example of setting up a new iSCSI volume, from the client (initiator) side.

Great example showing the configuration of both ends of an iSCSI device - the initiator (client) and the target (server).

Ganeti is a cluster virtual server management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM and other Open Source software.

Overview of sharding techniques.

Watir, pronounced water, is an open-source (BSD) family of Ruby libraries for automating web browsers.

A collection of Awk one liners.

An explanation of how the awk one liners in awk1line.txt work, which doubles as a good awk tutorial.

Server Fault thread in which I found the answer to a question I had about nginx and chunked encoding - an answer I had written earlier myself!

Highlights some exploitable vulnerabilities in a commonly suggested configuration for nginx + php, and discusses fixes/workarounds.

Summary: an explanation of Image Magick’s unsharp masking parameters, and how the filter compares to the unsharp mask filters in Photoshop and the GIMP.

Notes on how to make rrdtool display graphs with colour gradients. Hint: it's a hack.

Not presented as a flowchart, but that's what it feels like to me. A great step-by-step breakdown of tuning MySQL (including consideration of architecture, application and OS.)

Tool for simplifying the process of taking a consistent (i.e. safe) snapshot of an Amazon EC2 EBS volume.