Hello,
I am getting ready to order another box and was thinking of trying LightSpeed rather then Apache2. Is the performance worth the extra $25.00 per month?

Yes it is. If you have cpanel, you can copy the apache configuration to your lite speed server with the cPanel Plugin.

If you do not believe me, just use the trial until you decide to purchase it.

It is 5 to 10 times better than apache.

It saves on hardware costs for sure.

Lite Speed Web Server protects you from DDOS Attacks.

The only draw back is that you can not allow adult sites.

If you call that a draw back at all, it depends on if you allow adult sites or not.

Running LS (using apache configuration) with InterWorx CP (Opteron 165 w/ 1GB RAM).

Site's running WordPress smoke similar WP sites on my WHM/CP srv (Quad Q9300 w/ 4GB RAM)

What I like the most, besides the performance gains, is the LiteSpeed CP....it is simplistic.

On another subject....I've been using the InterWorx CP about 3 months and can say (thus far) it totally blows away all other CP's I've used (PSA, Cp, DA, WM, Cobalt RAQ <----had to through in the RAQ from my RackSpace days---LOL

Yes the lightspeed perform better than apache in some instances as when its comes to handling the doss attack. It can handle Huge doss attack effectively without crashing.

Lite Speed Web Server protects you from DDOS Attacks.


I need to point out it protects against attacks that actually hit the web server. There are attacks like SYN floods that Litespeed won't be able to do anything about since it's causing problems before it hits the web server.


So anyways from our experience it is a step above Apache because of how it's built. It's an event driven web server while maintaining Apache compatibility which is great. It's LSAPI system for PHP is great as well and they've been making strides to improve it even more.

One thing to keep in mind though is how you design your server. If you were using suPHP you needed less memory typically in comparison to FastCGI or Litespeeds LSAPI. So I'd just make sure you have enough memory sitting around to maintain pools of PHP processes for users. It's more of a trade off you take on more memory on the PHP side in exchange for it being less hard on the CPU and the drives.

@rlshosting:
Just out of curiosity, why can't you have Adult sites on a LiteSpeed server? is this some sort of limitation?

@rlshosting:
Just out of curiosity, why can't you have Adult sites on a LiteSpeed server? is this some sort of limitation?

This does seem weird. Any backup on that?

It's in their TOS, but Hawkhost has confirmed in another thread, that they aren't that vigilant on it and don't really enforce that aspect of their tos.

Not sure I would want to utilize software that decree's what my customers can run whether they enforce it or not, one day they might pull your license.

Moral issues aside what is to say that they wont disallow hosting (insert some religion or something here) in the future.

It's not an issue for us as we don't allow adult hosting of any kind, but I agree. I'm not sure what their reasoning is for disallowing it. If it's a technical issue (as these attract ddos attacks, often utilize high resources, and are often compromised) then I don't have an issue. If it's because of moral issues, then that's a whole different issue.

Why not lighttpd? we use it and its great as it can handle large volumes of requests.

Because lighttpd isn't a drop in replacement for apache and can cause issues with various apache modules.

ive compared 2 servers on apache on the same dc node, on a 50mb connection etc with ping of 30ms to both servers, althougth litespeed was faster i did find it was slower at its first responce by a fraction if that makes sence

are you sure that LightSpeed is not allowed in Adult stuff ?
where do they say that

are you sure that LightSpeed is not allowed in Adult stuff ?
where do they say that

Read the Section "License to use": http://www.litespeedtech.com/docs/webserver/ent/

Why not lighttpd? we use it and its great as it can handle large volumes of requests.

Not ocmpatible with control panels, no htaccess support.

You cannot use the SOFTWARE PRODUCT for any illegal activity or to host pornographic content.

*shrug* we just switched to it recently and we don't specifically monitor for "pornographic" content. If something is illegal then yes but otherwise, that's a little unreasonable. Legal content should be legal content. I don't believe morals should be pushed down onto a business purchasing a product such as a web server licensed and directed at the website hosting industry.

anyone have anything bad to say about this product? We installed this for one of our managed hosting customers who requested it, and then after 4 months they requested we take it off - I don't remember the exact issue?
they were running apache, with red hat and had cpanel and were running a large media application.

anyone have anything bad to say about this product? We installed this for one of our managed hosting customers who requested it, and then after 4 months they requested we take it off - I don't remember the exact issue?
they were running apache, with red hat and had cpanel and were running a large media application. $300 a CPU core, XML as configuration, *basic* ip filtering (read: anti-DDOS) rules should not be application specific although this is more of a fault of the operating system being completely brain dead that doesn't have network or even better ip filter namespaces.

What do you mean $300 a CPU core?

lightspeed performs better in some instances when its comes to doss attack.
Apache might get crashed under small doss attack on the other hand lightspeed can handle huge doss attack without any crash. Also lightspeed is good for serving static pages.

"LiteSpeed" is something we tried and were very unhappy with on the front-end due to the their lack of FreeBSD support. Although, after quite a bit of us chasing the devs to help us out they started taking us seriously. We had most of our issues resolved but there are still some bugs. Appears to be very low levels of support for their most expensive product which is the Load Balancer. There are a few bugs we've found but overall, after running it through it's trials, we caved :)

I used to give Jeff at BlackLotus a hard time about LiteSpeed until we actually used it for a month. It's not an "effective" tool against DDoS protection but it is tolerant of mild ddos attacks. It can be tuned and it does handle load well. Recently we migrated all of our shared hosting customers to it and use it in other areas where it fits.

The load balancer product we've made use of in clustered environments and we use it with CARP on FreeBSD to provide full clustering. It's solid. To be honest, it's been an excellent investment. Even with the bugs and issues we've found, the lack of developers, etc. If they would address our issues we'd be 150% onboard but right now, we're sticking to 75%.

I have concerns over there apparently being 1 developer who also appears to make the majority of the decisions because I'm guessing he started the project and wrote the product. My concern there is the seem less committed to products like LSLB which doesn't bring in the amount of revenue that the web server does. I understand you have to put more development cycles where the money is but I also feel like you should support the products you sell with the same levels of support.

If I pay $65.00/month vs a guy who pays $14.00 or $32.00, it gripes me that they get better support due to the larger customer base. Release cycle for LSLB seems slow and definitely on the back burner. LSWS seems to get 99% of the attention and you can tell it's much more refined, which is a bit of shame that one product significantly performs better than another.

Overall, I'd recommend LiteSpeed even though I've always been very adamant to defend Apache. I still say that Apache 2.2 will perform on-par with LiteSpeed and if configured correctly, can offer the same benefits.

Although, ease of management, simple integration with cPanel/DirectAdmin, and overall stability....It's worth the cost to spend less time worrying about missing <>'s or "" in your config file and breaking every client on the box until you find the problem ;)

Thumbs up.

Overall, I'd recommend LiteSpeed even though I've always been very adamant to defend Apache. I still say that Apache 2.2 will perform on-par with LiteSpeed and if configured correctly, can offer the same benefits.

http://blog.litespeedtech.com/2009/12/16/litespeed-lsapi-vs-apache-passenger-vs-nginx-passenger/

It's not even close.

I read the license to use, and did a find for "adult" but could not find this thing about not allowing adult content in their tos.

http://blog.litespeedtech.com/2009/12/16/litespeed-lsapi-vs-apache-passenger-vs-nginx-passenger/

It's not even close.

That's a benchmark against Ruby which the majority of website owners aren't going to care about. Real testing is dynamic PHP or static files. I've yet to see a benchmark of LiteSpeed vs properly configured Apache 2.2 or nginx.

I don't think it's been posted because they aren't going to post the marginal difference or possible defeat. I agree that Litespeed is faster than Apache out of the box and likely, always! Although, it does rub me a little odd that a company which directly competes with Apache 2.2 and nginx in the web server market, will not publicize results of a benchmark against the current opposition.

I agree it's fast, stable, and a good buy. Although, I believe Apache and nginx should also get the respect they deserve.

http://blog.litespeedtech.com/2009/12/16/litespeed-lsapi-vs-apache-passenger-vs-nginx-passenger/

It's not even close.

But look at who did that "benchmark". Lightspeed themselves. I'm not saying that its not right, but it is their own product.

Conclusion
Based on above simple tests, LiteSpeed + REE + LSAPI are the preferred configuration. -Lightspeed Blog

Well of course it is! It woulnd't look good if Apache won and they posted it on their blog.

"LiteSpeed" is something we tried and were very unhappy with on the front-end due to the their lack of FreeBSD support. Although, after quite a bit of us chasing the devs to help us out they started taking us seriously. We had most of our issues resolved but there are still some bugs. Appears to be very low levels of support for their most expensive product which is the Load Balancer. There are a few bugs we've found but overall, after running it through it's trials, we caved :)

I used to give Jeff at BlackLotus a hard time about LiteSpeed until we actually used it for a month. It's not an "effective" tool against DDoS protection but it is tolerant of mild ddos attacks. It can be tuned and it does handle load well. Recently we migrated all of our shared hosting customers to it and use it in other areas where it fits.

The load balancer product we've made use of in clustered environments and we use it with CARP on FreeBSD to provide full clustering. It's solid. To be honest, it's been an excellent investment. Even with the bugs and issues we've found, the lack of developers, etc. If they would address our issues we'd be 150% onboard but right now, we're sticking to 75%.

I have concerns over there apparently being 1 developer who also appears to make the majority of the decisions because I'm guessing he started the project and wrote the product. My concern there is the seem less committed to products like LSLB which doesn't bring in the amount of revenue that the web server does. I understand you have to put more development cycles where the money is but I also feel like you should support the products you sell with the same levels of support.

If I pay $65.00/month vs a guy who pays $14.00 or $32.00, it gripes me that they get better support due to the larger customer base. Release cycle for LSLB seems slow and definitely on the back burner. LSWS seems to get 99% of the attention and you can tell it's much more refined, which is a bit of shame that one product significantly performs better than another.

Overall, I'd recommend LiteSpeed even though I've always been very adamant to defend Apache. I still say that Apache 2.2 will perform on-par with LiteSpeed and if configured correctly, can offer the same benefits.

Although, ease of management, simple integration with cPanel/DirectAdmin, and overall stability....It's worth the cost to spend less time worrying about missing <>'s or "" in your config file and breaking every client on the box until you find the problem ;)

Thumbs up.


Their load balancing product reminds me of haproxy.



Overall, I'd recommend LiteSpeed even though I've always been very adamant to defend Apache. I still say that Apache 2.2 will perform on-par with LiteSpeed and if configured correctly, can offer the same benefits.


It will no doubt about it :)


I personally don't use or recommend litespeed.

Lightspeed will help you a little against DDOS attacks but it will give you a hard time when you need to add or modify something in PHP.

That's a benchmark against Ruby which the majority of website owners aren't going to care about. Real testing is dynamic PHP or static files. I've yet to see a benchmark of LiteSpeed vs properly configured Apache 2.2 or nginx.

That will be posted later on their series of blog posts.

but it is tolerant of mild ddos attacks.

To be fair, that's not really saying much for the bulk of users - you can "DoS" many, many Apache servers who's admins just throw up mod_prefork + mod_php5 + mod_perl + mod_kitchensink and don't touch the limits just by running apache bench or a similar tool on them. :D

I always say that if you can part with a two-core license monthly and still make a profit, and you don't feel like going through the hassle of tuning Apache that LSWS is probably not a terrible investment.

I haven't seen it being worth the money for me though.

TonyB: Did Cody (I think that's who was going to do it) ever get around to running that benchmark? I'm still really curious to see the results (whatever they may be).

http://blog.litespeedtech.com/2009/12/29/benchmark-comparison-on-serving-small-static-files-litespeed-vs-apache-vs-nginx/

Nginx pales in comparison when serving small files. :o

Running LS (using apache configuration) with InterWorx CP (Opteron 165 w/ 1GB RAM).

What I like the most, besides the performance gains, is the LiteSpeed CP....it is simplistic.

On another subject....I've been using the InterWorx CP about 3 months and can say (thus far) it totally blows away all other CP's I've used (PSA, Cp, DA, WM, Cobalt RAQ <----had to through in the RAQ from my RackSpace days---LOL

I'm a bit confused about this... I've heard that getting Lightspeed to work with Interworx cp is not possible? so far cPanel Plesk DirectAdmin is supported by LightSpeed but not Interworx???...something with apache reboot etc not really sure...

Does anyone besides you run this Interworx/LightSpeed on a VPS?! I would love to run this combo on my Centos 5 VPS!!!

http://blog.litespeedtech.com/2009/12/29/benchmark-comparison-on-serving-small-static-files-litespeed-vs-apache-vs-nginx/

Nginx pales in comparison when serving small files. :o
All the money in the world says this benchmark is IO bound meaning it's useless since nginx doesn't use async IO so threads get 'locked' waiting for IO, do a grep IO ./auto/options in the nginx source to see AIO is set to no.

I think I'd rather have more nginx servers than less, lightspeed servers.

I know that lightspeed is supposed to have perfect compatibility with Apache, but the close-source does put me off. If we need a feature or we have a problem in Apache or Nginx, we can simply write it ourselves or modify the source and recompile.

Nginx is a fast small web server. I'm using it for my image hosting site. There are more Nginx servers than Lighttpd ones according to Netcraft surveys.

The trouble is there isn't much official documentation/support but that doesn't stop me from using it.

All the money in the world says this benchmark is IO bound meaning it's useless since nginx doesn't use async IO so threads get 'locked' waiting for IO, do a grep IO ./auto/options in the nginx source to see AIO is set to no.

So even lighttpd can outperform nginx since it has AIO?

So even lighttpd can outperform nginx since it has AIO?

Well, that won't be the only factor but with (not really familiar with AIO) synchronous I/O operations, it would mean that it has to wait for an I/O to complete. However, AIO operations run in background without affecting other people's site for example. I guess you can say its better off with AIO since you can basically, 'multi-task'. Thats a performance benefit.

I recently changed to LiteSpeed, and I'm surprised how the load fell from its insane ~1.00 Average to a good 0.11. I'll definetly say its worth it, compared to wasting endless amount of time optimizing your Apache and MySQL to suit each individual user on the server. And the time wasted or problems faced setting up nginx to serve static content (which I did).

http://blog.litespeedtech.com/2010/01/06/benchmark-comparison-on-serving-simple-php-litespeed-vs-apache-vs-nginx/

Surprising results.

I wouldn't bother with it.

When we still did shared and reseller hosting we had LiteSpeed on all of our servers and VPSes. We did indeed see a great increase in performance. The only thing that really bothers me is the pricing but it really isn't that bad.

All the money in the world says this benchmark is IO bound meaning it's useless since nginx doesn't use async IO so threads get 'locked' waiting for IO, do a grep IO ./auto/options in the nginx source to see AIO is set to no.
You are completely wrong on this. The benchmark is using a very small static file, the content of the whole file will be cached in kernel disk I/O buffer when the file is accessed for the first time, then kernel wont need to access disk for the rest of the benchmark test. It is true for LiteSpeed, Apache and Nginx.

We use a 1Gbps NICs attached to a 24 Ports Gb switch for the benchmark, the network is not the bottle neck either. The benchmark test is complete CPU bound.

We did not enable AIO for this test as it does not help, but make it slightly slower. ;)

Talking about AIO, lighttpd uses direct disk I/O, which means that it cannot take advantage of the kernel disk I/O buffer, for every request, lighttpd has to fetch the file content from disk, it certainly wont help with this benchmark. I think it will shorten the life of the disk as it make HD work a lot harder in certain situation. lighttpd AIO is only suitable for serving large amount of huge files which could not be efficiently cached in kernel buffer memory.

LiteSpeed's AIO implementation does not use direct disk I/O, and kernel disk I/O buffer is still in use, the only penalty of using AIO is a few extra kernel function calls to test whether the file has been cached by kernel.

Well, that won't be the only factor but with (not really familiar with AIO) synchronous I/O operations, it would mean that it has to wait for an I/O to complete. However, AIO operations run in background without affecting other people's site for example. I guess you can say its better off with AIO since you can basically, 'multi-task'. Thats a performance benefit.
For lighttpd AIO implementation, it is true only when kernel cannot effectively buffer the content of files being served. When kernel can buffer the file in memory, lighttpd AIO only slow it down and excessively scratching the disk.

So even lighttpd can outperform nginx since it has AIO? The reason nginx doesn't do AIO is because it's not stable or portable iirc BUT this can be solved IF you use more than one worker process.

The reason nginx doesn't do AIO is because it's not stable or portable iirc BUT this can be solved IF you use more than one worker process.

The fact is, nginx is adding AIO in 0.8.x release, not sure it is actually working or not, and whether its implementation is similar to lighttpd's or based on some other ideas.

The reason nginx doesn't do AIO is because it's not stable or portable iirc BUT this can be solved IF you use more than one worker process.

In disk bound situation, using multiple worker processes does help, that's for sure, but it wont be able to match the benefit of using AIO, believe it or not.;)