A slow server directly affects your website performance, user experience, SEO ranking, and business revenue. Whether you are running a PHP/Laravel application, WordPress, or microservices, server slowness often happens due to overloaded databases, excessive logs, heavy sessions, or insufficient resources.
In this blog, we will understand why servers become slow, how to identify the root cause, and the steps you can take to fix slowness, including cleaning unnecessary database tables like url_clicks, sessions, and oauth_access_tokens.
1. Why Does a Server Become Slow?
There are multiple reasons why a server slows down:
1.1 High CPU Usage
- Heavy MySQL queries
- Unoptimized tables
- Too many concurrent requests
- Loops or stuck queries
1.2 High RAM Usage
- Too many active PHP/Laravel sessions
- Large cache or log files
- Memory leaks in running services
1.3 Database Bloating
This is one of the most common reasons.
Some tables grow extremely large over time:
url_clicks→ track clicks, gets thousands of rowssessions→ old user sessions never cleanedoauth_access_tokens→ millions of expired access tokens
When these tables become huge, MySQL slows down.
1.4 Disk Issues
- Full disk
- Too many small files
- Huge log files
- Large session directories
1.5 Poor MySQL Configuration
A default MySQL config cannot handle medium or high traffic.
2. How to Check Why Your Server Is Slow
Before improving speed, you must identify what is causing the slowness.
Run these commands on your Linux server:
2.1 Check RAM
free -h
2.2 Check CPU Load
top
or
htop
2.3 Check Disk Space
df -h
2.4 Check MySQL Heavy Queries
mysql -u root -p -e "SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST;"
2.5 Check Which Tables Are Heavy
SELECT table_name AS TableName,
ROUND((data_length + index_length)/1024/1024, 2) AS Size_MB
FROM information_schema.TABLES
WHERE table_schema = 'your_database'
ORDER BY (data_length + index_length) DESC;
These checks clearly show whether the issue is CPU, RAM, Disk, or MySQL.
3. Delete Unnecessary Database Records to Improve Speed
Over time, tables like url_clicks, sessions, and oauth_access_tokens become extremely large and slow down the server.
Cleaning them regularly helps in:
- Reducing storage
- Improving SELECT queries
- Improving INSERT performance
- Speeding up backups
- Improving overall MySQL performance
Below are the most common fixes:
4. Cleaning url_clicks Table
This table grows very fast if your website has analytics or click tracking.
Delete old entries (older than 4 months) — 50,000 at a time
DELETE FROM url_clicks
WHERE created_at < NOW() - INTERVAL 4 MONTH
LIMIT 50000;
Run multiple times until empty.
5. Cleaning sessions Table
Laravel stores sessions in the database if configured.
Old sessions are useless and slow down queries.
Delete sessions older than 2 days
DELETE FROM sessions
WHERE last_activity < UNIX_TIMESTAMP(NOW() - INTERVAL 2 DAY)
LIMIT 20000;
Optimize table
OPTIMIZE TABLE sessions;
6. Cleaning oauth_access_tokens Table
OAuth tokens generated by Laravel Passport accumulate very fast.
Delete tokens older than 2 days
DELETE FROM oauth_access_tokens
WHERE created_at < NOW() - INTERVAL 2 DAY
LIMIT 50000;
Optimize table
OPTIMIZE TABLE oauth_access_tokens;
This improves MySQL performance dramatically.
7. Additional Steps to Improve Server Speed
7.1 Clear Laravel Cache
php artisan optimize:clear
7.2 Restart services
sudo systemctl restart apache2
sudo systemctl restart mysql
7.3 Enable MySQL Slow Query Log
SET GLOBAL slow_query_log = 'ON';
SET GLOBAL long_query_time = 1;
7.4 Increase MySQL performance
Adjust your my.cnf:
innodb_buffer_pool_size=2G
query_cache_type=1
query_cache_size=128M
max_connections=200
7.5 Clean large log files
du -sh /var/log/*
7.6 Remove unused packages
sudo apt autoremove
8. Automate Cleanup (Recommended)
To keep your server fast permanently, create a cron job to clean old records daily.
Example cron:
0 3 * * * mysql -u root -pYourPassword -e "DELETE FROM url_clicks WHERE created_at < NOW() - INTERVAL 4 MONTH LIMIT 50000;"
You can do similar cron jobs for:
- sessions
- oauth_access_tokens
