1

What is the biggest difference and concerns about OpenLitespeed (not premium Litespeed) and Apache?

About speed, security and management issues, what should newbies understand? This is not about web hosting service, I mean to install by myself? thank you

babbaweb
  • 11
  • 1
  • your question is too broad. I'd recommend you to set up two servers and do some comparisons by yourself. Check https://openlitespeed.org/benchmarks/wp-http2/ for the performance. Let me know if you need more information. – Eric Nov 12 '21 at 05:45
  • The fake benchmarks that @Eric and other Litespeed affiliates are sharing everywhere purposefully disabled FastCGI caching in Nginx to make it slower. Don't believe any of the benchmarks promoted by them: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/f06vse/litespeed_servers_seem_like_a_marketing_scam_are/ – Jesse Nickles Nov 12 '21 at 21:00
  • I am not sure where you got the idea that FastCGI was disabled. It is enabled in the configuration. Why don't you set up a server and try it? Hence, without cache, Nginx performance will drop from 3xxx to 1xx req/s... I can see how you might find LS benchmark numbers to be too good to be true. But we have repeatedly invited those of you who are nginx experts to share your configurations with us. Nobody ever takes us up on it. The invitation is still open anytime. – Eric Nov 13 '21 at 02:07
  • "Why don't you just try it?" is what every single Litespeed shill says. Do you guys distribute an approved list of things you are allowed to say while spreading propaganda around the internet? The dishonesty is incredible (and sad, really). – Jesse Nickles Nov 13 '21 at 19:09

1 Answers1

0

Instead of writing this out again, I'm going to quote and link to my previous answer:

As of 2021, some of the "improvements" that Litespeed has developed vs. Apache are more theoretical than practical, such as HTTP/3 support (UDP-only) which is not even widely supported:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60701073/any-benchmarks-showing-litespeed-faster-than-nginx-servers/69124776#69124776

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/litespeed-or-apache-for-wordpress/

The more "core" features of Litespeed are their PHP handler LSAPI (LSPHP) and server-level cache which they call LSCACHE (not to be confused with the WordPress plugin they also released separately). The benefit here is that the same vendor is coding all these things, which means they should work smoothly together and can follow a more accelerated development timeline, etc.

One of the biggest reasons that people assume Litespeed is "better" than Apache is because they don't realize Apache already supports multiple caching methods, but that is simply not advertised well by most web hosting companies who prefer making money from selling WordPress cache plugins, etc, or by calling their caching feature something ridiculous like "ABC HOSTING SUPER CACHE".

The other major reason is because Litespeed has invested considerable effort into "confusing" WordPress users especially by publishing dishonest benchmarks showing that Litespeed performance being much faster than both Apache and even Nginx -- dishonest because, they did things like disabling FastCGI Cache on the Nginx server to ensure it performed slower, among who knows what else.

In conclusion, most users should not be using OpenLitespeed in production at this point because it's brand new software and relatively unstable compared to Apache/Nginx.

Litespeed's aggressive marketing team is trying to get the word out, that's all.

And remember that many of the features in Litespeed (premium) are not available in OpenLitespeed... for example you must restart the server after any .htaccess changes. And of course, OLS also does not support open source PHP handlers like PHP-FPM, which is ironic... in fact, they have been actively discouraging users from trying to compile PHP-FPM on OLS servers, rather undermining their alleged "open source" project values.

Jesse Nickles
  • 250
  • 1
  • 12