[deanhills]

There isn't much input here to objectively reason with!.. But yes, if everything was equal application-wise, there is the Kernel upgrade that takes place from a major distribution upgrade to another [1].

Based on @Mashiro's input in Post#4, I would say that the jump from a 3.16.x (in Debian 8) to a 4.19.x kernel (in Debian 10) should not go unnoticed while everything else being equal.

Thanks for the feedback.

Hence why blindly following a tutorial rarely works!

Unless it's by a reliable source like Mashiro.    I'm almost convinced that he puts himself completely in the shoes of who is going to work through the tutorial.  And when he tests his tutorial (which he always does as they work each and every time) he also perfects all of the steps with the user of the tutorial in mind.

But yes, I've worked through MANY tutorials on the Web for step by step LAMP + WP from places like rosehosting.com and equivalent, and I think those are tutorials that have been written as "bait" to get traffic and to subscribe to their managed accounts services.  Like more often than not the tutorials are part of SEO.  So inevitably they miss out on finer details like step by step for creating directory trees, config files etc. I'm glad that I stumbled through them, even though it was a great waste of time, as I then got to appreciate the gaps in their tutorials when I worked through Mashiro's tutorials in the end. It was a good learning curve overall.

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[1]- Well I just saw the benchmarks in the last post of yours, I may comment on that next week.

Thanks.