Oracle Cloud Agent considered harmful?

Playing around with my OCI instances some more, I looked more closely at what was going on when I was able to trigger the load to go out of control, which seemed to be anything that did a fair amount of disk I/O. What quickly stuck out thanks to htop is that there were a lot of Oracle Cloud Agent processes that were blocking on I/O.

So in the time-honored tradition of troubleshooting by shooting suspected trouble, I removed Oracle Cloud Agent.

After doing that, I can now do the things that seemed to bring these instances to their knees without them falling over, so I may have found the culprit.

I also enabled PHP’s OPcache and some rough-and-dirty testing with good ol’ ab says I took the homepage from 6r/s to about 20r/s just by doing that. I am sure there’s more tuning that I could be doing. (Requesting a static file gets about 200 r/s.)

By the way, the documentation for how to remove Oracle Cloud Agent on Ubuntu systems is out of date. It is now a Snap package, so it has to be removed with sudo snap remove oracle-cloud-agent. And then I also removed snapd because I’m not using it and I’m petty like that.