Should We Switch To LiteSpeed?

[speedturtle]

That's mighty generous of HawkHost - TQ!

[speedturtle]

I've never heard of a lightspeed web server.

We plan on making our own benchmarks by simply monitoring / logging the current usage / requests and such with one of our server, then simply switching it to Lightspeed and watching it for the same period.

Interestingly, Cody has heard of LightSpeed.

I wouldn't be surprised if LiteSpeed and LightSpeed becomes synonymous over time.

[Cody R.]

Interestingly, Cody has heard of LightSpeed.

I wouldn't be surprised if LiteSpeed and LightSpeed becomes synonymous over time.

Unfortunately I mistyped it after reading through this thread. You may be thinking of Lighty (Light HTTPD).

[speedturtle]

No, I wasn't thinking of Lighty. Just from reading other forums, LiteSpeed/LightSpeed are used interchangeably. Quite understandable since they sound exactly the same and have very similar meanings. Wouldn't it be nice to have a webserver running at the speed of light?

Btw, why did HawkHost choose LiteSpeed over Lighty?

[KouseiKibou]

My guess is that they looked at the statistics, which show that LiteSpeed does indeed go quite faster than Lighty.

This is a comparison of the latest stable LiteSpeed and other popular servers.

[Tony]

No, I wasn't thinking of Lighty. Just from reading other forums, LiteSpeed/LightSpeed are used interchangeably. Quite understandable since they sound exactly the same and have very similar meanings. Wouldn't it be nice to have a webserver running at the speed of light?

Btw, why did HawkHost choose LiteSpeed over Lighty?

Simple Litespeed supports everything that Apache does including reading the httpd.conf from apache. This means we can drop install litespeed then click one button and switch over to it as our web server. A wrapper to apache is dropped in and cPanel plays nice with it modifying the conf file then restarting the web server without causing an issues.

My guess is that they looked at the statistics, which show that LiteSpeed does indeed go quite faster than Lighty.

This is a comparison of the latest stable LiteSpeed and other popular servers.

That's a tad bit old as version 3 has been out for a while and they're already several beta's into 4. But that data did help but the big one was other hosts giving praise saying how it improved their web server performance dramatically.

[KouseiKibou]

...Wow, they should really update their page.

I've heard a lot of good things about LiteSpeed also. Ironically, I found out what it was only a few days before coming here, as I read about it at WebHostingTalk.

[speedturtle]

...but the big one was other hosts giving praise saying how it improved their web server performance dramatically.

Most LiteSpeed hosts are happy except for eleven2. They started using LiteSpeed in Apr-2007 and after 15 months changed back to Apache in Jul-2008. Their customers had problems with cPanel, PHP5, 408 & 503 errors, and experienced a lot of downtime. Some of their customers were happy with LiteSpeed and some were not. Hopefully these issues should have been resolved by now in the latest LiteSpeed stable release.

1) What contingency plans do you have in the event that some problems cannot be resolved?

2) How are you going to deal with unhappy customers who want Apache back?

[Tony]

Most LiteSpeed hosts are happy except for eleven2. They started using LiteSpeed in Apr-2007 and after 15 months changed back to Apache in Jul-2008. Their customers had problems with cPanel, PHP5, 408 & 503 errors, and experienced a lot of downtime. Some of their customers were happy with LiteSpeed and some were not. Hopefully these issues should have been resolved by now in the latest LiteSpeed stable release.

1) What contingency plans do you have in the event that some problems cannot be resolved?

2) How are you going to deal with unhappy customers who want Apache back?

Well I got the back story of that whole thing as I asked litespeed themselves about this. One big issue was the person who had understanding of the web server at eleven2 left the company. The other issues described to even me seemed very strange. For one it does not affect cPanel in anyway. PHP5 runs fine and our site right now is being served via it. We make heavy use of mod_rewrite and all sorts of advanced features via htaccess and php which work fine. Our site receives more traffic than almost any of our customers do. So it is a good test case for what happens under high traffic for one specific site.

The PHP problems they experienced could have happened in a mod_php environment to. I believe they were running caching (eaccelerator, xcache ect.) These caching programs have issues with mod_php in shared hosting. If you do not know the causes or how to deal with them you're going to have problems. It is highly unlikely we'll be running such caching programs as soon as we're migrated. This would be something heavily researched and tested.

So to summarize the eleven2 issues I believe their problems with downtime lies with them. It has nothing to do with their web server at all. They continue to have problems and had problems before litespeed as well.

Also there are popular and expensive application hosts who have been using litespeed for a significant amount of time. They strive themselves on near 100% uptime in a cpanel environment. I'd take their thoughts on the product over someone like eleven2.

1) We are testing it on our system already. Our site is running fine with it on and we see no reason why it would not run fine on others. We also will deploy it slowely on production servers as test cases. We have no reason to believe there will be any problems.

2) There is no reason that someone would want to be back on Apache. The idea is this is a drop in replacement and nothing should change. If this wasn't the case we would not be considering it. We could not afford to support multiple configurations and will not once we have everything migrated over.

So to summarize we're not a one server company we have quite a few machines. So we can easily work out issues via on our own server or simply one machine with limited set of customers. But like I've been saying it's a drop in replacement where we could deploy it without anyone noticing. I imagine the majority of our users even with the notification would still believe we're hosting them on apache.

[speedturtle]

Yes, I took a look at LiteSpeed's case studies

[Tony]

Yes, I took a look at LiteSpeed's case studies

[speedturtle]

OK, looks good to me.

No further questions, Your Honor.

[speedturtle]

Well, thanks for patiently answering all my questions.

It's very assuring to us that you have thoroughly tested it out first and gave us an idea of what to expect and watch out for. Your confidence and experience with LiteSpeed definitely helps to allay any concerns we might have regarding the migration. I'm aware that the benefits of LiteSpeed far outweigh any temporary issues that may crop up along the way. It's good that HawkHost will be closely monitoring the servers after the switch.

Definitely looking forward to the New Year!

[LCCEnterprise]

If there will be migration problems, then I wouldn't do it.

Other than that I recommend it.

[Hikari]

Well things went fine, I was 1 of those thinking I was still running over Apache!

I just took note of these changes because I was transfered from venus to mars and was using SSL for POP3 and SMTP, so after the transfer I kept accessing venus and stopped receiving mails.

Other than that everything is working fine for me as I can tell.

I have a question, I noticed LiteSpeed supports Servlet. I don't know how good it is compared to Tomcat. Do u plan on providing it in the future?

I prefere to develop in Java and Postgres, and while I have no projects ATM, it is good to have Postgres available in case of needing it sometime, and it would also be great to have Servlet available.

[Tony]

Unlikely to see Servlets any time soon as there are issues that we just have no figured out how to deal with. The big one being PHP and Perl run as the user the Servlets would not making it an absolute nightmare. It seems the best solution for Java is to look towards doing it yourself on a VPS.

[tkmo061]

I just installed WebCalendar 1.2.0 and am getting Litespeed 503 errors when performing some of the administrator functions. Have re-installed twice and still get the same errors. I have no idea if it is related to the Litespeed upgrade or the 1.2.0 version. I ran 1.1.0 for a year with no issues. If you guys get a chance you may want to do some testing with 1.2.0.

I can open a ticket but I don't want to spend a ton of time with support if the issue is with the 1.2.0 code and not the new webserver platform. Worst case I go back to 1.1 but wanted to share this info with you.

[Tony]

503 errors are to due with the application not responding. As to the exact error I cannot say why it's not responding. It could be issues with PHP 5.2.8 which is recent as well or maybe LiteSpeed who knows. You're best to make a ticket because we can check logs for this sort of thing.

[HRJ]

Unlikely to see Servlets any time soon as there are issues that we just have no figured out how to deal with. The big one being PHP and Perl run as the user the Servlets would not making it an absolute nightmare. It seems the best solution for Java is to look towards doing it yourself on a VPS.

Even I would love to have Java Servlet support.

Setting up one of the enterprise grade servlet containers might be difficult. But, a small one like Winstone or even Derby is very very easy.

Please consider adding this support. I need it for my application.

I can help you set it up too.

[HRJ]

But, a small one like Winstone or even Derby is very very easy.

Whoops, I meant Winstone or Jetty.

Derby (database engine written in Java) is a completely different ball of wax.

[Tony]

The problem is it will not run as each user but rather as the web server. We prefer that anything we offer whether it be Perl, PHP, Python ect. run as the user. If that is not the case it's a big headache and a security nightmare in a lot of cases as well.

[HRJ]

I still think it is possible to "run as user".

If you are interested, I could show you a simple demo of how it works. Please contact me directly on my email..

[gnummep]

We prefer that anything we offer whether it be Perl, PHP, Python ect. run as the user. If that is not the case it's a big headache and a security nightmare in a lot of cases as well.

And it's saves so much time when installing scripts, not have to CHMOD! I always hate it when I have to do that.

[Tony]

I still think it is possible to "run as user".

If you are interested, I could show you a simple demo of how it works. Please contact me directly on my email..

Even if it could there are still the issues of integration with the web server. We don't run Apache for one.

And it's saves so much time when installing scripts, not have to CHMOD! I always hate it when I have to do that.

Yep it's a nice thing to not have to worry about chmoding any files. Upload the files and you're ready to go. It's surprising how many hosts still use mod_php and as a result we have users who will chmod every file to 777. Or if it's not straight away they run into any issue no matter what they chmod all their files to 777 only to find out that's not the solution at all.