Open LiteSpeed vs LiteSpeed or maybe Apache 2.4

seriesn · November 2019

I have googled enough and most of the articles are at least a year old if not older. Anyone care to chime in? Is spending an additional $50 bucks on a webserver license really worth the upgrade?

Nginx is not an option. Don't even go there!

cybertech · November 2019

OLS has been best for me. Had tried to optimize NGINX 1.17+PHP 7.3+REDIS+WHATEVER CACHE+MYSQL8.0/MARIADB10.4 yet still could not come close to the low loads that OLS enjoys, straight out of the box.

Did not experiment with Apache yet, what's your setup like?

seriesn · November 2019

Apache 2.4, php-fpm, Mariadb 10.4.

Only thing I don't like about OLS is the fact that you need to reboot after every single htaccess update. Makes it, not fun for commercial hosting projects. But still can't justify paying $600-700/year on 1 software when that money can be well spent on hardware and network upgrades.

poisson · November 2019

Partly also depends on use case? Mostly static? What traffic are you expecting?

seriesn · November 2019

poisson said: Partly also depends on use case? Mostly static? What traffic are you expecting?

Multi-user instance. Dedicating 2 core to LS while the rest for other processes, I just don't know if that improvement is really worth the additional $40 per month. I guess I can do some stress testings. Adding that to many other things I should do.....

willie · November 2019

THAT expensive? You can buy an awful lot of hardware for that amount. I've never had apache be a bottleneck. Slowness has always been in the application. But, I'm not hosting zillions of sites.

If you're not hosting, what is the use case for LS?

WSS · November 2019

As with @willie, I just roll with Apache. I don't host thousands of sites (Around 110), and although reloading takes a few seconds, everything just works- with an > 99.9% uptime on old hardware.

InceptionHosting · November 2019

Honestly, from what I can see running it in a shared hosting environment it ‘can’ make about 2 points of difference in pagespeed scores to run litespeed instead of apache, but I would argue it’s just as possible to spend a few hours tweaking Apache to get the same results.

Litespeed probably just has better defaults.

I am considering scrapping it on the shared hosting service, not for the cost but the difference is so small while the issues with not being a true drop in replacement in every case are tangible in terms of support time it is not really gaining or justifying its marketing edge for me.

Apache with an nginx front end is the best combo imo but obviously a bit more work initially, that is how this place runs so lean.

seriesn · November 2019

@AnthonySmith said:
Honestly, from what I can see running it in a shared hosting environment it ‘can’ make about 2 points of difference in pagespeed scores to run litespeed instead of apache, but I would argue it’s just as possible to spend a few hours tweaking Apache to get the same results.

Litespeed probably just has better defaults.

I am considering scrapping it on the shared hosting service, not for the cost but the difference is so small while the issues with not being a true drop in replacement in every case are tangible in terms of support time it is not really gaining or justifying its marketing edge for me.

Apache with an nginx front end is the best combo imo but obviously a bit more work initially, that is how this place runs so lean.

Thanks man. I have considered using Nginx proxy in the past, something about it didn’t make sense in my head.

Let me play with it again and maybe that would be a better solution.

OLS might work for personal projects but not for commercial purpose.

seriesn · November 2019

@willie said:
THAT expensive? You can buy an awful lot of hardware for that amount. I've never had apache be a bottleneck. Slowness has always been in the application. But, I'm not hosting zillions of sites.

If you're not hosting, what is the use case for LS?

That’s the whole thing man. Do I spend that money a year on a software or get more powerful hardware? Feels more like a marketing thing vs actual usage.

willie · November 2019

I think for serving a lot of concurrent connections flat out, LS is like nginx and uses an async model while Apache uses threads and incurs the overhead of OS level context switches. So Apache can't be as fast regardless of tweaking. But as mentioned the bottleneck is usually the application and databases rather than the httpd itself. So I'd be interested in measured differences.

As for hardware vs. software, I'd philosophically rather spend the money on hardware, since hardware speed per unit cost keeps increasing, while software is the opposite (they keep jacking up the prices).

I got into a weird discussion with an LS zealot on Hostballs a while back, where I said that hosting was the only application I could see where LS made any sense. It still seems that way to me.

Can anyone explain the relevant differences between LS and OLS?

Seastar (see for example http://seastar.io/http-performance/) has always impressed me but I don't think its httpd tries to implement the level of apache compatibility that hosting would require.

flips · November 2019

Hope I'm not derailing the thread. I'm using a shared host that runs LiteSpeed, and LSCache seems to work very nicely with Wordpress installations (I haven't implemented it on the WooCommerce sites yet, though).

When setting up Apache on a small'ish VPS, what caching should I check out for Apache and/or WP?
(And for Apache, is prefork vs multi still a choice/consideration?)
I really like Lighty, though. Looking to do some testing (un-idling of VPSes) the coming months.

seriesn · November 2019

@flips said:
Hope I'm not derailing the thread. I'm using a shared host that runs LiteSpeed, and LSCache seems to work very nicely with Wordpress installations (I haven't implemented it on the WooCommerce sites yet, though).

When setting up Apache on a small'ish VPS, what caching should I check out for Apache and/or WP?
(And for Apache, is prefork vs multi still a choice/consideration?)
I really like Lighty, though. Looking to do some testing (un-idling of VPSes) the coming months.

I am sad to say, I can't find any expert reviews on OLS vs LS that is not at least a year old. After much testing, by me, who is not anywhere close to being an expert, it works as it is supposed to. Only hate is the constant requirement of reloading for htaccess update and lack of LSCache.

flips · November 2019

LSCache? Didn't I run that in OLS? (I thought it was free/included.)

seriesn · November 2019

@flips said:
LSCache? Didn't I run that in OLS? (I thought it was free/included.)

Unless I botched something up, it didn't work

ukhan · December 2019

@flips said:
LSCache? Didn't I run that in OLS? (I thought it was free/included.)

It work fine on OLS for me.
PS i use it with DirectAdmin

Unixfy · December 2019

@seriesn said: Unless I botched something up, it didn't work

Yeah, seems to work fine for me on CyberPanel as well. Also, didn't Openlitespeed recently implement the htaccess support without reload/reboot recently? https://openlitespeed.org/kb/how-to-autoload-htaccess-with-openlitespeed/

seriesn · December 2019

What's up people! Long due update.

Yes, lscache works. @Unixfy didn't know about this! Interesting.

MikeA · December 2019

If it's for web hosting clients LS is worth it. Get an owned license if you have enough clients/funds, pays itself off basically after a while.

ulayer · December 2019

LS honestly seems pretty useless due to their licensing insanity. If it can only use 2 cores, while nginx could use all 8 (for example) I doubt you'd be getting any better performance with LS. Nginx has pretty mature caching as well. Never used or seen OLS running though.

seriesn · December 2019

So dear pros, can someone please explain why LS is better than OLS?

sasuke · December 2019

I do have same question. Is LiteSpeed worth the price ? Been running shared hosting and want to provide premium service to customer. And right now I am damn confused either to get a new location or get LiteSpeed.

Abdullah · December 2019

No PRO.
OLS supports only DA & Cyberpanel?
LS Enterprise is designed to be a drop-in Apache replacement, while OLS is not. OLS does, however, understand Apache directives.
Sometimes new features are added to OLS before LSWS, and as such OpenLiteSpeed may be considered less stable.

https://openlitespeed.org/support/

AK_KWH · December 2019

@sasuke if u want to use same server then us LiteSpeed however its my personal suggestion buy another one in other location

sasuke · December 2019

@AK_KWH said:
@sasuke if u want to use same server then us LiteSpeed however its my personal suggestion buy another one in other location

Thanks mate, instead of getting litespeed I opted to buy new hardware and colocate, good for long run.

masedi · December 2019

If you need a ready to go, without any headache of tuning and configuring your web server stack, go with LS! I bet it is the best option for commercial hosting. While, OLS is good for personal / private project.

But, if you have more time and money is your limitation... Why hoping paid solution for your commercial use?

LS is for lazy sys admin

cybertech · January 2020

@cybertech said:
OLS has been best for me. Had tried to optimize NGINX 1.17+PHP 7.3+REDIS+WHATEVER CACHE+MYSQL8.0/MARIADB10.4 yet still could not come close to the low loads that OLS enjoys, straight out of the box.

Did not experiment with Apache yet, what's your setup like?

after trying for a month plus, can finally agree with what Anthony said about tuning, especially since he got LES running with 512MB ram.

Nginx 1.17.7
PHP 7.4 (redis/exif/opcache)
Mariadb 10.4

After tuning child process, innodb size/cache etc, test site can scale comfortably between 1 - 4GB ram.

Loader.io test:
For a single vCPU (gold 6136) 1GB ram it can do 6000 client requests over 1min without errors.

For quad vCPU (3800x) 2GB ram it goes 10,000 over a min (max allowed for free account) without breaking a sweat. It probably needs at least 30K to feel the heat.

No longer need for litespeed. much fun!

Francisco · January 2020

@cybertech said:

@cybertech said:
OLS has been best for me. Had tried to optimize NGINX 1.17+PHP 7.3+REDIS+WHATEVER CACHE+MYSQL8.0/MARIADB10.4 yet still could not come close to the low loads that OLS enjoys, straight out of the box.

Did not experiment with Apache yet, what's your setup like?

after trying for a month plus, can finally agree with what Anthony said about tuning, especially since he got LES running with 512MB ram.

Nginx 1.17.7
PHP 7.4 (redis/exif/opcache)
Mariadb 10.4

After tuning child process, innodb size/cache etc, test site can scale comfortably between 1 - 4GB ram.

Loader.io test:
For a single vCPU (gold 6136) 1GB ram it can do 6000 client requests over 1min without errors.

For quad vCPU (3800x) 2GB ram it goes 10,000 over a min (max allowed for free account) without breaking a sweat. It probably needs at least 30K to feel the heat.

No longer need for litespeed. much fun!

OLS is lacking in its .htaccess abilities.

For instance, you can't do ACL's like:

order allow,deny
deny from all

I ran into this today helping a customer secure their WHMCS vendor folder.

Francisco

LeonDynamic · January 2020

The htaccess compatibility can be a problem with OLS. Generally you can add all the usual rules but with a slight tweak. As I use most of the same rules across different websites with OLS I just created a custom file (thank you, DirectAdmin) and every new vhost has the rules added automatically.

With OLS you can adjust the workers to your choosing, the default is 2. With LSWS you will only be able to use the maximum workers per your licence.

If I was using LiteSpeed in a commercial environment I would go with LSWS so clients can adjust their htaccess easily. If it was for my own websites I would go with OLS.

smtalk · January 2020

@seriesn said: Only thing I don't like about OLS is the fact that you need to reboot after every single htaccess update. Makes it, not fun for commercial hosting projects.

I had this created for that: https://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=2097. Can be used on any non-DA environment as well, just modify "/home//domains//*_html/" path there to fit your control panel.

poppz · January 2020

@cybertech said:

@cybertech said:
OLS has been best for me. Had tried to optimize NGINX 1.17+PHP 7.3+REDIS+WHATEVER CACHE+MYSQL8.0/MARIADB10.4 yet still could not come close to the low loads that OLS enjoys, straight out of the box.

Did not experiment with Apache yet, what's your setup like?

after trying for a month plus, can finally agree with what Anthony said about tuning, especially since he got LES running with 512MB ram.

Nginx 1.17.7
PHP 7.4 (redis/exif/opcache)
Mariadb 10.4

After tuning child process, innodb size/cache etc, test site can scale comfortably between 1 - 4GB ram.

Loader.io test:
For a single vCPU (gold 6136) 1GB ram it can do 6000 client requests over 1min without errors.

For quad vCPU (3800x) 2GB ram it goes 10,000 over a min (max allowed for free account) without breaking a sweat. It probably needs at least 30K to feel the heat.

No longer need for litespeed. much fun!

I'm actually in the process of setting up a new VPS with @seriesn (lovely servers, fastest I've ever had) to try get away from SpinupWP and would like to do it manually to have more freedom of customization down the road.

Do you have any tips or tricks for latest nginx+php7.4 optimization? I read that MySQL 8 is more than five fold faster then latest stable MariaDB but I've yet to try it out.

Open LiteSpeed vs LiteSpeed or maybe Apache 2.4

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