LiteSpeed Speeds Up XenForo in New Case Study
- Thread starter Moshe1010
- Start date
TheBigK
Well-known member
I posted our observation on my site: http://www.crazyengineers.com/threa...-world-page-loading-speed-test-results.70941/ and Michael from LiteSpeed replied. Do check it.
Moshe1010
Well-known member
What's the problem?
Mouth
Well-known member
No problem, just interested in a LiteSpeed vs Nginx comparison to see the pros and cons of each and which gives better performance. Haven't used Apache for 3+ yrs, so comparisons with Apache mean very little to me.
Moshe1010
Well-known member
Well, you won't get a concrete answer about this. Some people can swear by Nginx and others by Litespeed. It really depends how heavy is your software (add-ons, etc`), how many people visit your website, your box specs, and how well you know to configure Nginx.
Litespeed is pretty much good out of the box with very minimal tweaking needed for most of us.
If you have the money, and you have a medium-large community, I would defiantly go with Litespeed to save server cost in the long run. With my testing over different configurations, Litespeed performed better, but I haven't had the time to play with Nginx very long.
I'm using Litespeed in the last 6 months or so, and I'm very happy about my decision to purchase a license. Take in account that Nginx doesn't support htaccess if that's important for you (it is for me).
6 of one half a dozen of the other, in some areas Litespeed wins, in others Nginx. All in all the overall performance is pretty similar, though I have personally found LS to be faster than Nginx on serving php content when running with LSAPI.
What it comes down to however is simple.
Ease of use vs price.
Nginx is free, but comes with a steep learning curve and the hastle of having to re-configure everything.
LiteSpeed costs monthly (or one off) however takes 2 minutes to install, is exceptionally well tuned out the box and litterally is plug and play in almost any system.
What your paying for is convenience.
TPerry
Well-known member
Don't like leasing software, so I'd be looking at $799 x 2. I think I'll stick with mucking through nginx's config files.
I could see purchasing it if it was a money making proposition, but for a hobby site it's overkill.
OpenLiteSpeed looks promising, but because of some quirks I experienced I couldn't use it.
Don't like leasing software, so I'd be looking at $799 x 2. I think I'll stick with mucking through nginx's config files.
I could see purchasing it if it was a money making proposition, but for a hobby site it's overkill.
OpenLiteSpeed looks promising, but because of some quirks I experienced I couldn't use it.
Nginx for a hobby site is overkill
Any site generating enough traffic to warrent using Nginx, should also be generating enough income to lease a Litespeed License.
Moshe1010
Well-known member
Leasing Litespeed for small-medium websites that are using up to 1CPU license is a waste of money - it's better to own the license. If you are going to 2CPU license or better, than yes, leasing would make some sense; although if your website is online for few years, and you know it would be there in the coming years + you're making some revenue from your website, then it would make sense purchasing the license as well.
I bought the VPS 8GB RAM license. I don't think I would need something greater than this in the next couple of years.
I bought the VPS 8GB RAM license. I don't think I would need something greater than this in the next couple of years.
Floren
Well-known member
You could do the same thing with Nginx, purchase one of their support packages and they will tune your server to death... you don't have to move a finger. Not to mention that Nginx Inc. offers a custom Nginx software specifically tuned for performance with additional features not available into free version.
About .htaccess, you should not need this on a modern server with modern software. I don't know how LiteSpeed reads the .htaccess files but if it does it like Apache, then is pretty bad. Apache needs to check EVERY directory in the requested path for the existence of a .htaccess file and if it exists, it reads EVERY one of them and parses it. This happens for EVERY request. You should stop using .htaccess period, is horrible for performance. This is one of many areas where Nginx shines.
I also wonder why companies like Facebook, Wordpress, Github, Cloudflare, Netflix, Intel, etc. don't use LiteSpeed.
TPerry
Well-known member
Not if you don't like Apache.Nginx for a hobby site is overkill
Folks that complain about the complexities of nginx are complaining about nothing much. After running it for as long as I have I recently set up a VPS on one of my servers using Apache2 - lord I forgot arse-backwards the configuration for it was.
Of course, if you HAVE to have a gui interface of some type then Apache2 or LS are about your only two choices as I haven't found a good front end for nginx (and really haven't been looking).
It also stands to reason only a fool wouldn't want to maximize performance if they can do it for free.
Not all sites are about the "money". Some are about providing users with a good experience. Hopefully my forums will take off in a year or two and even when they do, the only income that I foresee coming from them will be a small adsense ad at the footer for registered users and in 2 additional spots for unregistered.
Interesting comments there Floren, you first say you don't know how the web server works, and then make a very generic, and subsequently wrong statement. LiteSpeed caches .htaccess so it eliminates the massive overheads that apache suffers.
Also saying people should stop using .htaccess is like saying people should stop putting petrol in their cars. Your average Joe end user isn't going to be able to work out how to use nginx, let alone convert rewriterules.
As for why those companies don't use LiteSpeed, the money... when you get into massive multi-server clusters, Licensing becomes exceptionally expensive...
Mouth
Well-known member
I consider myself average Joe .. and learnt both without any problems. Maybe I'm just too humble, or really good at google and reading.
Floren
Well-known member
I was referring to the way Apache works, not LiteSpeed:
As mentioned into previous post, I only dealt with Apache and Nginx, I have ZERO knowledge on LiteSpeed.
It is nice that LiteSpeed does not follow the Apache footprint for .htaccess.
I was referring to the way Apache works, not LiteSpeed:
As mentioned into previous post, I only dealt with Apache and Nginx, I have ZERO knowledge on LiteSpeed.
It is nice that LiteSpeed does not follow the Apache footprint for .htaccess.
I was refering to this comment:
Litespeed at the end of the day is aimed at hosting providers, their core market is cpanel and plesk servers looking to squeeze more customers into a smaller space by loading up a high performance http server. The fact that some of us like to use them otherwise for the drop in and play functionality is a nice bonus without having to spend hours re-configuring a server to use nginx
OpenLiteSpeed is aimed more towards the sysadmins, granted it has a few down sides, but, they're working with us to provide a solid, alternative solution to Nginx.
Floren
Well-known member
I see, thanks for explaining.
The good part about LiteSpeed .htaccess that the data is cached, but I think it still behaves like Apache... except that it looks into memory for .htaccess data? Which is a lot faster. To my understanding, .htaccess files need to be scanned constantly, regardless if they are cached or not. To myself, this is still an overhead... even if cached. Why not simply avoid it, like is done in Nginx?
I see, thanks for explaining.
The good part about LiteSpeed .htaccess that the data is cached, but I think it still behaves like Apache... except that it looks into memory for .htaccess data? Which is a lot faster. To my understanding, .htaccess files need to be scanned constantly, regardless if they are cached or not. To myself, this is still an overhead... even if cached. Why not simply avoid it, like is done in Nginx?
They can be completely avoided if you so wish, you just load them into the vhost rewrite rules part of LiteSpeed instead
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Floren
Well-known member
I understand that, @Slavik. The thing is, you should NOT need to perform any rewrite rules, as they are very expensive on server resources. I don't use any rewrite rules on Nginx to have friendly URL's in XenForo (for example). I fact, I don't use any rewrite rules, as they are not needed.
http://www.axivo.com/go/openssl
http://www.axivo.com/go/openssl
Code:
location /go {
...
location /go/openssl {
return 301 https://www.axivo.com/community/threads/180/;
}
...
}