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Providers, how effective does Litespeed perform for you?
Howdy,
I've been looking into Litespeed for some time now. Before making any switch for any server, It's worthy to take opinions and advice of you all.
My main reasons and criteria are cpu usage (vs lsphp) and performance. It might be effective than apache but how good is it compared to lsphp (Keeping in mind that it's also a product of Litespeed)?
Special tag @Francisco
Comments
Litespeed performs better then apache for sure but its not affordable.
I have heard really good words about engintron.com (nginx as proxy) so its worth checking it as it totaly free.
When I switched to LiteSpeed there was an ok drop in load and sites did perform a bit better, in a large shared environment LiteSpeed is definitely the way to go instead of Apache. Things like Engintron are nice but have bugs or limitations.
Pricing seems ok to me. 2 core license would be around 45/m. I don't think I wouldn't need more than 2 core even on a 10c/20t or 20c/40t server but can upgrade as we go!! I'd personally avoid nginx as it's not officially supported. I can sleep peacefully knowing a team of developers is working to solve any bug with LS.
Were you using lsphp or just apache?
I used Apache (+CloudLinux) for a long time, switched to Engintron then switches to LiteSpeed.
Why would someone use Litespeed when there is Nginx?
I suppose you ment 'wouldn't'.
Yes, one core is usually enough, as LiteSpeed itself won't use a lot of CPU, unlike PHP, MySQL,...
I tested cloudlinux's lsphp, but it didn't show any significant gains. So I disregarded it.
LiteSpeed vs Apache
I have tested LiteSpeed vs Apache (without Engintron) in a DO VPS with loader.io hitting a wordpress blog:
LiteSpeed was using about 1/5 of what Apache was using. Loader.io only loads the page, it doesn't load .css .js, ... . Meaning that in the real world scenario, Litespeed would (most likely) outperform Apache even harder.
ModSecurity
I also later loaded Comodo Modsec Rules into both VPS's. I don't know how much the LiteSpeed rule list differs from the Apache one.
For the same number of concurrent connections from loader.io, while Apache was hitting 100% CPU usage, LiteSpeed was only using 5% (I though that this was weird, so I retested everything and even trigered the rules to make sure everything was working properly, but everything looked fine)
Another thing before I go
If you are going for the shared environment, one thing that may be a selling point for Wordpress users and may also reduce your server load is the new Image Optimization (beta), that comes inside LSCache. It's free for them, and it uses LiteSpeed servers to optimize the images, so your server doesnt have to deal with free plugins that optimize the images internally.
I did this testing over two months ago, Apache performance may have improved.
Probably shared hosting
Because it's not possible to run Nginx by itself through cPanel. Engintron is just a proxy, it still leaves a bunch of underlying issues with Apache.
@eva2000
Litespeed was great for us, but, there’s a free trial license. Why not test for yourself and see how it works in your environment ?
I've been running it for a couple of years on my dedicated servers, and works really well. QUIC support is also a nice feature.
I had a licence issue 18 months ago with Licensecart, and when it defaulted back to Apache, load on the servers went from ~0.8 to > 3 in both instances.
I did my tests but since a lot of providers are already using it under load, it made more sense to me to get some suggestions. In my own tests, it worked pretty good.
Also, everyone seems happy with results. Time is near to make changes
What about openlitespeed? Is it also better than apache? I'm hosting some wordpress sites with very low traffic...
In that case I would suggest you go with nginx, especially with @eva2000 's centminmod
in context of commercial shared hosting/providers = litespeed would easily be the choice especially if you're using cpanel as litespeed integrates nicely
If you're just hosting your own web sites that you own/manage yourself with no other admin, then choices can extend to nginx, openlitespeed and if you want litespeed.
FYI, openlitespeed and litespeed performance is very close just litespeed supports integration as a cpanel/whm plugin and has native .htaccess read file support. While openlitespeed doesn't have cpanel plugin integration and can't natively read .htaccess files - instead requires htaccess/mod_rewrite rules added into admin console level config file (think of it like requiring to add apache .htaccess rules at httpd.conf level only)
FYI #2, openlitespeed and litespeed aren't a magic bullet either. Just switching from apache to them may not always be enough. At very high concurrent traffic levels, litespeed/openlitespeed will also need tuning for better performance. For me that is around 400,000 to 500,000 unique ip visitors/day range.
Indeed at high concurrent cache hit miss (non cached) request levels, nginx reverse proxy to apache will still be subject to the weakness and resource hogging Apache server as those cache misses will hit Apache backend. I've seen this alot of nginx reverse proxy and varnish reverse proxy to apache. In these instances, using Litespeed instead of Apache in cpanel/whm environment makes sense as Litespeed LSAPI PHP scales better than Apache even with Apache 2.4 event based MPM + PHP-FPM.
Or, you know, setup a vhost and hard code static content to another daemon that doesn't proxy through, oldschool style.
Experience is always relative, but you will rarely see litespeed performing worse than apache. The usual arguments against litespeed that some folks throw around may also be valid for their specific usage requirements.
Yes you could but the context of that statement for this discussion's purpose is for commercial shared hosting. How many web hosts would do this for shared hosting ?
Depends on what you're paying them.
Most of them won't run arbitrary shell scripts to manage customer accounts, either.
true, hence for shared cpanel/whm, I'd use litespeed if traffic requirements require it