LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 Released
Posted by bobsilva September 05, 2006 @ 12:05 AM
LiteSpeed Web Server is a commercial product that offers a free version for private and commercial use. With release 2.2, LiteSpeed Technologies has embraced the Rails community and provided built-in support for deploying Rails Applications.
According to their website, they are “the world’s best performing Ruby SAPI and easiest Ruby on Rails application setup”. I put their claims to a test in a couple of screencasts for your viewing pleasure.
If you haven’t checked out LiteSpeed yet, give it a try.
LiteSpeed looks very cool, great screencasts. I am going to download it and play with it tonight.
LiteSpeek looks very promising as an alternative Rails deployment platform. Performance and deployment are bit of concerns when developing large scale Rails system. Very pleased to see Rails and web server communities are doing great job to alleviate these concerns. It’ll be nice to have someone comes up with a benchmark comparing all the Rails deployment environments.
I think I’ll give LiteSpeed a try too. Sounds and looks very interessting.
There are also cons: free (basic) version of LiteSpeed cannot utilize more than one processor. I cannot find load ballancer neither.
No sendfile support in standard? coughcripplewarecough – So what’s the point of standard then, just a bone thrown to the “free” software guys? lame.
Standard looks like it’s good enough for personal use or a try-out.
Stop whining just because every product isn’t free. It looks pretty decent at first glance.
I just tried this server and I must say it works great. Extremely easy configuration and it feels snappier than a apache2/mongrel setup.
The basic version seems to be fine for everything but the biggest sites. It only supports one cpu, but the ruby processes will use all cpu’s and they do most of the work anyway.
I don’t get why sendfile support is so essential, it serves files just fine without it.
I have been trying LS for the last few weeks and I must say I’m very impressed. I have even asked questions on the forum and got responses by the staff pretty qucikly even though I am not a paid subscriber. It took me a while to figure out all the options but I’m pretty happy with the results.
AEM
Let’s see how many times I can change web servers this year.
As far as I can tell, LiteSpeed doesn’t support case-insensitive filesystems.
This means it’s subject to very, very simple security breaches without significant (and difficult) work on the part of the administrator configuring the server.
If anyone can point to evidence to the contrary, I’d love to see it.
I’d recommend anyone who has a LiteSpeed server running on HFS+ or any other case insensitive filesystem try getting things like ”.HTACCESS” and ”/PrIvAtE/foo” (assuming /private/ is a directory protected by access controls) and see if it works?
Also, they don’t seem to prevent access to HFS+ data forks. For example, getting ”/path/.htaccess/..namedFork/data” should fail, but I see no sign they’ve covered this.
It’d be very prudent to test these things before using it in a public-facing place.
If you need sendfile then you’re probably serving enough traffic to pay for a license. The free version is 99% feature complete with the enterprise version.
To: Jaroslaw Zabiello LSWS itself only use one CPU, however Rails LSAPI processes will use all available processing power.
To: mixonic sendfile help most when serving large static files. even without sendfile, our standard edition is still faster than the most of other web servers for serving normal web content. When running mostly rails, the performance loss due to lacking sendfile is negligible. BTW: sendfile support will be in our standard 3.0 release.
Jaroslaw: I believe there is indeed a load balancer module included with the free version.
That said, there is another very significant downside: a limit of 10 virtual hosts. If you are only planning on running a handful of sites on each box, this probably won’t pose a problem. But this limitation simply does not mesh with the needs of those who want to host more than a handful of domains on one machine.
Justin: There is is NO virtual hosts limit and has been so for a long time. You can have UNLIMITED virtual hosts even for the free standard version of litespeed.
I would like to see detailed comparison with Lighttpd, not only Apache. I have moved from Apache to Lighttpd and I would like to see if there are any serious reasons to move to LiteSpeed. Lighttpd is open source, can uses dual core processors, has builtin load balancer, has no limits of basic version of LiteSpeed and is also faster than Apache. LiteSpeed’s admin panel is nice but for mee it is not a big deal.
Xing: Very glad to hear that the virtual host limit is no longer there. That fact was not reflected on the litespeedtech.com web site as of a couple months ago; it still mentioned a 10-host limit. Nonetheless, thank you for the clarification—that’s great news! Congrats on a terrific product so far.
Jaroslaw,
The best option is to install ruby-lsapi and litepseed, then fire up LiteSpeed on a separate port and point it at an existing Rails app (same app lightty is pointing to) and run httperf against both of them. LiteSpeeds website does have benchmarks, but I’d still suggest running your own.
LiteSpeed has a load-balancer built-in as well and while LiteSpeed will only use one CPU, Ruby will use them all. The only real limitation is sendfile and the mmap caching of small files is sufficient for most applications. LiteSpeed “claims” it still beats Lighttpd at static sending with the Standard Edition but I have not tested this myself.
Lighttpd is still a very capable webserver if open source is preferred. Ease of administration and performance were at the top of my list when I was shopping around. I’m not a C programmer so being able to modify the source of the webserver didn’t play into my considerations.
Either way, both servers fulfill the needs of 95% of the users.
sendfile = uploading files?
I moved one of my test sites to Litespeed 2.2 and it was extremely easy to do. The folks at Litespeed were unbelievably patient and helpful when I couldn’t get one non-rails site working.
I love the ease of use, and it is quick to install. I’m loving the already provided Rails template which i can just detach into a new VHOST after I’m dong configuriong.
I have 3 different rails app serving out of 3 separate VHOSTS off of Litespeed and it is working quite nicely.
I don’t know about the security concerns someone raised, but hopefully the Enterprise version deals with that, because I’m planning to buy this baby.
i would like to see some comparsion between litespeed and mongrel
Your Rails application will always be the bottleneck. For light to medium-duty apps, Mongrel’s performance is fine. You won’t really see the benefits of a C++ based server vs. a Ruby one until you start getting under heavy load.
You can’t really do a fair comparison between LiteSpeed and Mongrel since Mongrel requires something else in front to distribute requests to the cluster. The best you could do is configure LiteSpeed to only start one instance and compare that against a single Mongrel, but that would be pointless as it doesn’t represent a real deployment environment.
we’ve been using litespeed in production for several months on tourfilter.com and we love it – supereasy to configure (btw we run 18 vhosts no problem) via the web or command-line, restarts near-instantaneously, easy built-in gzip compression which makes my site 10x snappier all by itself, configuring rails is a total breeze with the LSAPI support. Big win for us is that we are not sysadmin geniuses and find the idea of configuring apache with mongrel or lightpd with fastcgi kind of intimidating. and litespeed is the opposite of intimidating without any downside that has been apparent yet … favorite moment: load average of 12 and litespeed still served our (page-level cached) homepage snappily …
and i’m not even running 2.2 yet! can’t wait to upgrade (which you do by clicking a button on the webadmin interface :) )