Open LiteSpeed

euantor

Well-known member
Not sure if anybody's heard about this, but LiteSpeed have released a lightweight open source web server called Open LiteSpeed.

Here are some of the listed features:

Main Features
  • Minimal memory footprint.
  • WebAdmin GUI with real-time statistics.
  • Apache compatible rewrite engine.
  • Worker processes for scalability. Ability to bind certain processes to particular workers.
  • High-performance event-driven architecture using kqueue (FreeBSD and OS X), epoll (Linux), /dev/poll (Solaris), and poll.
  • Can handle thousands of concurrent connections.
  • Easy virtual host configuration via templates.
External Applications Support
  • Supports PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, and Java external applications.
  • LSAPI, a LiteSpeed-native SAPI, greatly improves PHP and Ruby speeds.
  • Delegates external applications to separate processes, increasing efficiency.
  • Buffers requests and responses to external applications to more efficiently serve multiple connections.
  • Efficient CGI daemon.
  • Compatibility with third party PHP accelerators.
Security Features
  • Apache compatible SSI support.
  • SSL support and hardware acceleration.
  • Bandwidth and connection throttling.
  • IP-based access control.
  • HTTP basic authentication.
  • Referer limiting.
  • Response rate limiting.
  • Buffer overrun guards.
Stability Features
  • Graceful restart feature allows application of configuration changes and upgrades without server downtime.
  • Fault tolerance and instant restarting.
  • Runs completely in user space. OS reliability is not affected.
Basic Features
  • Accept-filters and TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT support.
  • sendfile() support.
  • Pipelined requests.
  • Gzip compression for reduced bandwidth use.
  • Chunked transfer encoding.
  • Keep-alive connections.
  • IPv4 and IPv6.
  • Entity tags.
  • Multi-range requests.
  • Exact/prefix/regex-based matching.
  • Name-based and IP-based virtual hosting.
  • Custom error pages.
  • Autoindexing.
  • MP4 and F4V streaming.
  • IP geolocation.
  • Can send logging to logging server.
  • Simple load balancing.
  • XML or flat file configuration.
  • Can serve as a reverse proxy to accelerate static content delivery, compress throughput, or run security.
Supported OSs
  • CentOS 5 and 6
  • Ubuntu 8.04 and up
  • Debian 4 and up
  • OS X 10.3 and up
  • FreeBSD 4.5 and up

I haven't yet found any proper benchmarks compared to nginx, but I might try it out over this week. I wondered if anybody else has had a try and can provide some thoughts?
 
I just heard of this today from TAZ. This really sounds promising, and I might try it out within the week, although I wonder which features were removed.

EDIT
Hosting control panel compatibility, mod_security compatibility, .htaccess file compatibility, and page caching will remain commercial-only.
 
If if they just included htaccess compatability, imho this would be THE web server of choosing for pretty much everybody.

Having said that, if the issue is just adding the htaccess directives to the web-gui.... then... hmm definately onto a winner?
 
It still supports Apache rewrites via the Admin page (that's what I've heard, not sure), just not through .htaccess. I do the same for rewrites with NginX (having to manually open up configs) so I guess there wouldn't be a difference between the ease of use between the two. As for performance, LiteSpeed and NginX were two web servers that exceeded expectations, only NginX being better at serving static content IMO.
 
So intial setup was easy enough,having some issues with mysql though, for some reason it doesn't want to connect to it.
 
Dunno, but I can start this server.
Code:
[ERROR] Failed to start litespeed!

Debian 7 fresh install VirtualBox.

-edit-
I got it. Installation required curl to download PHP 5.3.24 from us.php.net and I dont have any curl installed.

So:
Code:
apt-get install curl
will fix that.

I guess they should tell us about this. :D
 
Okay, so I recommend to all who want to test it.

Install PHP before install Open LiteSpeed.

My bad. I mean:

Install curl and beware about your PHP version.
 
Looks pretty speedy to me. Hard to tell if that's the webserver or the hardware though. Will be adding a new droplet tomorrow to try it out a bit for my self.

Obviously it will be fast due to it being a new install, no data no load etc.

However, in real time I spent maybe an hour from a barebones box, installing centos + deps and then getting it running.

I've never realy used litespeed before, however, seems simple enough, so will have a better play tomorow.
 
5.3, was having some issues with 5.4, but think I may have worked them out now, will try again tomrow, getting late now.
 
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