Zero-downtime deploys on a cheap VPS

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The problem

Most performance issues come from doing too much work on every request. Measure first, then fix the slowest part.

💡 Tip: profile in production-like conditions — your laptop lies.

The solution

Here is the core idea in a few lines of Bash:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
release=$(date +%s)
git clone --depth 1 "$REPO" "releases/$release"
ln -sfn "releases/$release" current   # atomic switch
sudo systemctl reload php8.3-fpm

⚠️ Warning: cache invalidation is the hard part — always set a TTL.

Results

• Response time dropped from 820 ms to 140 ms.
• Database load fell by 70%.
• No new infrastructure needed.

✅ Best practice: add a regression test so the slowdown never comes back.