LiteSpeed server becoming more common?

[cfish]

I've just moved my Invision Community (v4.4.6) to a new hosting platform, based on the LiteSpeed server. Everything appears to be running correctly without the need for any tweaks and I just checked this forum to see if anyone else has experience of running IPB under LiteSpeed. Mostly what I found is the support team saying that LiteSpeed is non-standard and therefore any problems experienced are to do with the hosting platform and not with IPB. That worried me a little and I wondered how seriously the Invision Community team are taking LiteSpeed, which in my experience is rapidly gaining critical mass in the hosting sector. There is absolutely no doubt that it is faster (significantly) than Apache and will continue to gain traction. My question is, how popular must a new technology like LiteSpeed become before it is no longer considered "non-standard"?

[Ausy]

I moved to a lightspeed server recently and initially the software would not run. Sometimes the software will not work depending on the php stack used. Fortunately my host took time to fix it for me but there was nothing support could do in the end.

[cfish]

It sounds as though I've just been lucky.

Would be interesting to know what percentage of IPBs are now running on LiteSpeed. From my tests, the forum now runs much faster than it did on Apache, even with cacheing enabled.

I hope this is something the dev team are looking at for the future.

[cfish]

As a follow-up, I've been doing some research on LiteSpeed and it's support on other applications. Naturally, there is support and dedicated cache plugins for popular apps like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. But what interested me is that those forward-thinking folks at Xenforo are also supporting LiteSpeed with a dedicated cache plugin and the results sound impressive. Hopefully, the Invision team will start to take LiteSpeed seriously in the near future 🙂

[Rhett]

17 hours ago, cfish said:

As a follow-up, I've been doing some research on LiteSpeed and it's support on other applications. Naturally, there is support and dedicated cache plugins for popular apps like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. But what interested me is that those forward-thinking folks at Xenforo are also supporting LiteSpeed with a dedicated cache plugin and the results sound impressive. Hopefully, the Invision team will start to take LiteSpeed seriously in the near future 🙂

It's a webserver, it's not really something on our end that we need to do, we support/recommend apache by default, as it's the most common config. For the best performance results, leading the way is apache + nginx as a reverse proxy if you are interested in the best performing setup. This setup also fully supports htaccess, so nothing to do on our end. There are many web servers that will work great depending on the setup and configuration, they are not really something that we need to provide support for, as we only support our software, not web servers.  As far as caching goes, our current focus is Redis, which some use for larger sites where they need something more. It looks like there is redis support with lightspeed also. 

Hope that helps clear any confusion up though.

Thank you

 

[bfarber]

https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/ws-apache,ws-litespeed,ws-nginx

Litespeed has 4.6% market share (according to this one random statistic), while nginx and apache have a combined ~75% market share. We do not see an extreme number of clients using Litespeed, or at least those who do are not having Litespeed-specific issues that we are asked about (i.e. we are simply unaware that they're using Litespeed specifically). As Rhett said, we only provide support for our software and not the server environment you are hosted on. If you encounter an issue that appears to be specific to your hosting environment, we will refer you back to your host. Beyond that, if you want to use Litespeed go for it.

On 9/2/2019 at 6:30 AM, cfish said:

...But what interested me is that those forward-thinking folks at Xenforo are also supporting LiteSpeed with a dedicated cache plugin and the results sound impressive....🙂

Just a small correction - that plugin appears to have been developed by a third party, not the "folks at Xenforo" (specifically, the third party appears to be affiliated with Litespeed technologies based on the description at the page you linked to). Any third party is welcome to do the same for our software if they feel so inclined. I suspect the only reasons it hasn't been done is (1) Litespeed simply isn't that commonly used and (2) we have pretty solid Redis support built in and supported out of the box.

[cfish]

Thanks for your observations on this. It's entirely possible that my perception of the hosting sector is incorrect - it seems to me that migration to LiteSpeed is accelerating. Wikipedia note that LiteSpeed was nowhere in July 2018 (less than 1%) but had 3.9% market share by February 2019. Will be interesting to see what the market share figures look like in 12 months time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_server#February_2019