EST. 2026 — Notes from real server work SYSADMIN · SECURITY · AI · DIRECTADMIN Issue 01
THE SYSADMIN ALMANAC
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Optimization

#Optimization

3 articles
Workflow
Images Fail on Mobile in Pages Hidden with display:none
Web

Images Fail on Mobile in Pages Hidden with display:none

A site switches pages using display:none, but opening another page on mobile leaves blank black images, even though the files return 200 and both fetch and new Image succeed. The culprit is the IntersectionObserver behind loading=lazy not firing when the page changes from none to block, and simply setting loading=eager is still not enough.

#javascript#css#mobile-dev#web-performance
9 min read·17 Oct
Moving JSON Time Series to Columns Without Changing the Dashboard
Linux

Moving JSON Time Series to Columns Without Changing the Dashboard

I stored entire device frames as JSON arrays at one row per second. After two weeks, the tables had grown to 183 MB at the endpoint and 625 MB on the server, with JSON_EXTRACT queries that could not use an index — here is how I moved the data into int columns and had the API rebuild a sparse array without changing a single line of the dashboard.

#mariadb#mysql#migration#performance
10 min read·11 Oct
Moving Computation from PHP to the Browser: 12 Seconds to 12 ms
Linux

Moving Computation from PHP to the Browser: 12 Seconds to 12 ms

A single page ran tens of thousands of subqueries and took 12 seconds to load. I fixed it by precomputing a summary table, sending a single 107 KB dataset, and moving the formulas to the browser, bringing computation down to 12 milliseconds, with a parity test that requires JS results to match PHP on every row.

#performance#php#javascript#laravel
9 min read·29 Aug