Litespeed as your web server instead of Apache?

Server Config
1

So, how many people here are using litespeed as their web server instead of apache?

Websites that wither under pressure from the slashdot/digg-effect more often than not use the status-quo Apache web server. Apache is the stable market-share champ from Apache foundation (Welcome to The Apache Software Foundation!) that is showing its age and has not enjoyed an evolution performance upgrade in decades: simply perform some benchmark search queries on Yahoo/Google and one will find that Apache 2.0 is barely if at all faster than Apache 1.3 it replaces. When it comes to performance and scalability, LiteSpeed is rightfully proud to proclaim that Apache is not in the same league.
Based the highest performing programming architecture, asynchronous event-driven model, LiteSpeed Technologies has created a world-class web server that not only breaks the status-quo when it comes to previously accepted performance/cost benchmark but also aspires to set a new standard where other web servers are compared to.

  • Based on benchmarks performed by LiteSpeed Technologies. Do not just trust our word for it, perform your own
    Infomation: LiteSpeed vs Apache

If you’re using Litespeed - when did you decide to move and what sparked the move for you?

2

TBH I’d use Nginx (and we do for some customers) as there are no artificial license restrictions in place of max connections etc. then.

3

I’m a fan of nginx as well, lightweight and fast.
Other options worth looking at:
lighttpd
cherokee

4

Is Ngnix faster than litespeed and apache, or? I’d love to hear more information about the others.

5

tested apache, nginx and litespeed and if you have a very large concurrent traffic based site, i’d choose litespeed. Some benchmarks here along with comparisons with litespeed cache and varnish cache and thoughts [url=http://vbtechsupport.com/33/]here.

Some of the largest vB forums online are using or switching to litespeed web server. Personally migrated a few of these myself >200,000+ unique ip visitors/day like traffic with 4,000-10,000+ vB users online and 10-30+ million posts :slight_smile:

static file benchmarks from Boosting vBulletin performance via caching - Apache+Varnish versus Litespeed Cache - Blogs - vBulletin Community Forum

1168×534 27.6 KB

6

Not that far behind though with Varnish in the mix, interesting numbers non-the-less though.

Getting off track, talk about a blast from the past, not seen you round these parts for quite a few years :slight_smile:

7

Hey Karl yes been a while hasn’t it… 6.5yrs! Always go to pop on by from time to time - might see more of me around here now I am playing around with varnish and litespeed cache more :slight_smile:

Yup varnish ain’t that far behind although varnish does have a 5+ yr head start over litespeed cache and is more mature. Varnish vcl has alot of flexibility - kind of addictive learning about :smiley:

8

Some of the largest vB forums online are using or switching to litespeed web server. Personally migrated a few of these myself >200,000+ unique ip visitors/day like traffic with 4,000-10,000+ vB users online and 10-30+ million posts

Ya, an online game(Aywas has recently switched over as well. That’s why I mentioned it and brought the topic up, and I’m also using Litespeed as my web server - and the site’s loading time has drastically improved since the change.

See their news post of switching to litespeed News • Aywas

Aywas is going to be upgrading to Litespeed, a server software that’s about six times faster than Apache, what we currently have. That should solve a lot of our lag problems, let’s hope. :wink:

Due to this, we may be going offline for a while. Not sure yet. If you see the site go down, that’s why!

EDIT: The transfer is complete. We are having some problems with Google Chrome so if you use Firefox you should not encounter any issues.
Posted by sandSLASH (#1) on Sat Mar 12, 2011 9:37pm

9

For what it’s worth, there isn’t any reason you can’t use multiple stacks here. The cool kids these days seem to be fronting everything with ngix then passing off workload to Apache or IIS for the application services. Has a whole slew of advantages beyond the speed angle.

10

yup page load speed is side effect of better efficiency with litespeed - just wait until your start scaling in terms of concurrency traffic - litespeed will shine very brightly there :slight_smile:

yes reverse proxy to Apache or IIS is one way of tackling the problem, but as you scale the backend server still is the limitation be it Apache or IIS. Especially for Apache as it is a memory hog.

11

Real scale issue tends to be the data store, not the app servers – you can load balance the app servers reasonably easily, especially if you use sticky sessons. Moreover, if you are fronting things with some sort of proxy, adding more nodes requires no dns tweaking, etc.

But keeping multiple data stores in synch without lots of overhead is fiendishly difficult if not impossible.

12

When did the conversion jump to load balanced servers ? :slight_smile:

I had one large vB forum client switch

from

4x apache load balanced web servers + db server

to

single litespeed web server + db server and still able to scale/grow their forums

Another vB client was struggling very badly and went

from

single apache with nginx reverse proxy for static files

to

single litespeed web server

And now flying along nicely

In both cases, the problematic load was mainly from php processes (mod_php). Apache as backend just can’t handle insane amounts of concurrent php related traffic.

But yes it’s a pain to deal with load balanced setups for the data sync, most of the times NFS is use in my case.