Xenforo On LightSpeed - Anyone?

[TheBigK]

I've been reading about LightSpeed webserver as a replacement of Apache. Almost everyone says that LightSpeed would offer huge performance improvement over Apache, making the site faster by 50%. I've also been told that with LightSpeed in place of Apache, the site will be able to handle more traffic.

I'm curious to know whether replacing Apache with LightSpeed would be worth it? We get traffic spikes almost on daily basis which cause Apache to go down for 3-10 minutes. We would definitely improve server specs, but want to know if LightSpeed would help.

 

[p4guru]

yes LiteSpeed > Apache

also check out OpenLiteSpeed too http://xenforo.com/community/threads/open-litespeed.50199/

 

[TheBigK]

yes LiteSpeed > Apache

also check out OpenLiteSpeed too http://xenforo.com/community/threads/open-litespeed.50199/

Thanks. I've checked that thread already. I'm more interested in knowing real world examples running LightSpeed and have Xenforo running. My WebHost offers LightSpeed (fully managed server) for an additional $35 for single CPU license and $50 for 2-CPU license of LightSpeed. I see that the commercial version has several plus points over the open version.

 

[Mike Edge]

We use LiteSpeed Enterprise 8CPU on all xF Host servers.

 

[TheBigK]

We use LiteSpeed Enterprise 8CPU on all xF Host servers.

Thanks. Do you think LightSpeed enterprise would be worth the shift from Apache?

 

[Mike Edge]

On a large site like yours, yes for sure. More so if you also add Memcache if you don't already use it. LiteSpeed has it's own cache, but I found xF forums run far better with having both memcache and apc PERL extensions installed and memcache configured in the xF config file. There is a 14 day, 2 core trial. Give it a try. It is Enterprise level, so you have every function working that you would after you purchase.

 

[TheBigK]

On a large site like yours, yes for sure. More so if you also add Memcache if you don't already use it. LiteSpeed has it's own cache, but I found xF forums run far better with having both memcache and apc PERL extensions installed and memcache configured in the xF config file. There is a 14 day, 2 core trial. Give it a try. It is Enterprise level, so you have every function working that you would after you purchase.

Thanks, we do have memcache enabled; but yet apache goes down whenever we go on Google News front page - which drives a couple thousand visitors in few minutes time. Typically XF response very well and we keep the load to under 1.

I've been told that LightSpeed smoothly replaces Apache - which means you don't have to change anything on your site to make it work. In addition, WHM offers a smooth shift between Apache & LightSpeed; and there'a few moments of downtime involved.

 

[Mike Edge]

Yeap, the WHM plug-in is easy to install. Longest part really is the fine tuning as the default settings are very low.

 

[Blackbeard]

I use Litespeed, I only use the 2 cpu version.

 

[Alpha1]

If I would not use LiteSpeed, I would need at least 1 extra server for my vb big board. It costs quite a bit but its well worth it. Once I migrate the site to XF I will definitely use Lightspeed.

 

[p4guru]

If I would not use LiteSpeed, I would need at least 1 extra server for my vb big board. It costs quite a bit but its well worth it. Once I migrate the site to XF I will definitely use Lightspeed.

+! Indeed, I had one client go from 8x Apache web server cluster to just using 3x Litespeed Enterprise 2 cpu license servers and still improve their sites performance. They got rid of 5x web servers they no longer needed to pay for !

Had another client go from 6x Nginx/PHP-FPM web servers to just 2x LiteSpeed Enterprise 2 cpu license servers with same if not slightly better performance on PHP side.

 

[MikeMpls]

I run 11 Xenforo sites & 5 WordPress blogs on LiteSpeed, probably about 4-5M total pageviews annually (only 3 XF & 1 WP sites are especially active, the others just fill niches), with occassional much higher bursts of activity if there's a really active thread.

I probably overbought after a popular thread got one of my accounts disabled in a shared-hosting environment last January, but I've had no similar issues in my new VPS environment with Litespeed ($600 annually including LiteSpeed vs. a total of $330 annually for 3 accounts in the shared-server environment).

My current (1 a.m. on an American holiday) CPU usage is 1.54%. I'm on a VPS-2 plan at KnownHost.

 

[TheBigK]

Thanks for the responses, folks.

Final Question: Does lightspeed work out of the box without needing any changes on the xenforo side? Will my 'pretty, seo friendly' URLs work with LightSpeed?

 

[Slavik]

Thanks for the responses, folks.

Final Question: Does lightspeed work out of the box without needing any changes on the xenforo side? Will my 'pretty, seo friendly' URLs work with LightSpeed?

Yup

 

[Alpha1]

Thanks for the responses, folks.

Final Question: Does lightspeed work out of the box without needing any changes on the xenforo side? Will my 'pretty, seo friendly' URLs work with LightSpeed?

That depends what you want to accomplish. LiteSpeed Cache has amazing advantages. LiteSpeed Cache will allow you to vastly reduce server strain coming from guests because it serves up the same cache version of your website to your guests. In my case this means millions of monthly users are no longer hammering the MySQL server and are still getting fresh content.
To activate LiteSpeed Cache you will need to define the website cache ID and install a varnish addon.
However, I am not sure that this is currently available for XenForo. Can someone tell me?

More information:
http://blog.litespeedtech.com/2011/01/28/speed-up-vbulletin-sites-through-litespeed-built-in-cache/
http://www.litespeedtech.com/support/wiki/doku.php?id=litespeed_wiki:litespeed:cache
http://blog.litespeedtech.com/tag/litespeed-cache/

 

[p4guru]

That depends what you want to accomplish. LiteSpeed Cache has amazing advantages. LiteSpeed Cache will allow you to vastly reduce server strain coming from guests because it serves up the same cache version of your website to your guests. In my case this means millions of monthly users are no longer hammering the MySQL server and are still getting fresh content.
To activate LiteSpeed Cache you will need to define the website cache ID and install a varnish addon.
However, I am not sure that this is currently available for XenForo. Can someone tell me?

well you can always ask in their LiteSpeed Cache forums http://www.litespeedtech.com/support/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=30

 

[TheBigK]

well you can always ask in their LiteSpeed Cache forums http://www.litespeedtech.com/support/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=30

I'd ask it on their forums, but that'd break my new year resolution of avoiding vBulletin at any cost.

 

[MikeMpls]

I run 11 Xenforo sites & 5 WordPress blogs on LiteSpeed, probably about 4-5M total pageviews annually (only 3 XF & 1 WP sites are especially active, the others just fill niches), with occassional much higher bursts of activity if there's a really active thread.

I probably overbought after a popular thread got one of my accounts disabled in a shared-hosting environment last January, but I've had no similar issues in my new VPS environment with Litespeed ($600 annually including LiteSpeed vs. a total of $330 annually for 3 accounts in the shared-server environment).

My current (1 a.m. on an American holiday) CPU usage is 1.54%. I'm on a VPS-2 plan at KnownHost.

Might finally have another one of those threads like the one that forced me to move to KnownHost a year ago.

I finished posting a new thread thread about an hour & fifty minutes ago and submitted it via Google & Bing webmaster tools. Checked the forum just now and it is showing 987 users (6X-9X the usual), with 1036 views for that thread (# views is updated by a task and usually lags a bit).

The account usage @ KnownHost is showing 4.89% CPU usage, bandwidth usage 9.49%.

 

[Volion]

Using LSWS also, love it.

 

[MikeMpls]

Might finally have another one of those threads like the one that forced me to move to KnownHost a year ago.

The thread has had almost 65K views in four days, about 55K in the first 48 hours with user counts often in the 900's -- no server issues, thank you KnownHost & LightSpeed.