Litespeed web server goes open source, OpenLiteSpeed

by eva2000 · Published May 11, 2013 · Updated May 13, 2013

LitespeedTech folks have announced an open source free version of their Litespeed Enterprise web server called OpenLiteSpeed. Unfortunately, seems OpenLiteSpeed is missing a few features compared to their Litespeed Enterprise web server, including:

hosting control panel compatibility
.htaccess file compatibility (seems Apache rewrite syntax is supported just via OpenLiteSpeed Admin control panel for Virtual Hosts under rewrite tab)
mod_security compatibility
page caching

Started to test OpenLiteSpeed web server and write a bash shell installer script to pair OpenLitespeed with CSF Firewall and MariaDB MySQL in a similar fashion to my Centmin Mod Nginx installer. Check page 2 for more screenshots of OpenLiteSpeed’s VirtualHost GUI based admin control panel.

Main Features

Minimal memory footprint.
WebAdmin GUI with real-time statistics.
Apache compatible rewrite engine.
Worker processes for scalability. Ability to bind certain processes to particular workers.
High-performance event-driven architecture using kqueue (FreeBSD and OS X), epoll (Linux), /dev/poll (Solaris), and poll.
Can handle thousands of concurrent connections.
Easy virtual host configuration via templates.

External Applications Support

Supports PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, and Java external applications.
LSAPI, a LiteSpeed-native SAPI, greatly improves PHP and Ruby speeds.
Delegates external applications to separate processes, increasing efficiency.
Buffers requests and responses to external applications to more efficiently serve multiple connections.
Efficient CGI daemon.
Compatibility with third party PHP accelerators.

Security Features

Stability Features

Graceful restart feature allows application of configuration changes and upgrades without server downtime.
Fault tolerance and instant restarting.
Runs completely in user space. OS reliability is not affected.

Basic Features

Accept-filters and TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT support.
sendfile() support.
Pipelined requests.
Gzip compression for reduced bandwidth use.
Chunked transfer encoding.
Keep-alive connections.
IPv4 and IPv6.
Entity tags.
Multi-range requests.
Exact/prefix/regex-based matching.
Name-based and IP-based virtual hosting.
Custom error pages.
Autoindexing.
MP4 and F4V streaming.
IP geolocation.
Can send logging to logging server.
Simple load balancing.
XML or flat file configuration.
Can serve as a reverse proxy to accelerate static content delivery, compress throughput, or run security.