Litespeed or not? 8 GB RAM, 8 vCPU, 30 sites, but how many workers?

[eugenevdm.host]

We're seriously considering Litespeed with the sole objective to make our WordPress websites load faster. I have a few questions about this:

* In your experience, does Litespeed compared to Apache make a big difference?
* We see licensing is for RAM or workers and sometimes cores. It's a bit confusing, but from their pricing it looks like we're in for $36 or $46, Webhost Entry or professional, as we have 8 GB RAM, and 8 vCPU.

I have to point out at present the server is actually performing very well, we just feel perhaps going over to Litespeed will give us that edge.

Are there any risks associated with changing from Apache to Litespeed?

 

[cPanelLauren]

Hello,

Litespeed has the following up: Compare LiteSpeed Apache nginx - LiteSpeed Technologies

This is a bit older but one of our employees performed this benchmark test which Litespeed has still on their site and it's in my opinion still relevant: Benchmarks: LiteSpeed vs. Apache with cPanel + WordPress ⋆ LiteSpeed Blog

The forums post here also discusses performance difference: Significant performance increase with LiteSpeed

They also do a pretty good job of detailing potential issues with switching between apache and lsws: cPanel - LiteSpeed Documentation - LiteSpeed Web Server

 

[eugenevdm.host]

I can provide some feedback now as last night we converted to Litespeed. 100+ total sites, about 30 WordPress sites.

1. Most sites load faster.
2. We have 12 GB RAM,and went with the defaults,it installed 2 workers.
3. It's really use friendly installation, very advanced, the way it takes care of everything. Super smooth.
4. It's really quick and easy to switch between Litespeed and back to Apache in case you need to.
5. It's really easy to deploy the WordPress cache plugin to individual sites, from an admin point of view.

Issues:

1. Before we hardly had any excessive resource usage warning, now we get them all the time. Here is a typical one:

lfd on xyz.host: Excessive resource usage: abc_client (48050 (Parent PID:51451))

Resource: Process Time
Exceeded: 1811 > 1800 (seconds)
Executable: /opt/cpanel/ea-php72/root/usr/bin/lsphp

2. Every single WordPress site, including those that don't have Litespeed plugin, but those who do have WordFence plugin, is sending a warning. Litespeed not compatible with WordFence without below .htaccess:

# BEGIN litespeed noabort
<IfModule rewrite_module>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=noabort:1]
</IfModule>
# END litespeed noabort

This is manageable but will be a pain going forward because we'd have to identify when people install WordFence.

Reference:

Wordfence and LiteSpeed - Wordfence

The LiteSpeed web server has been known to kill or stop processes that take more than a few seconds to run. It does not stop these processes gracefully but simply kills them silently. This guide outlines how to prevent this.

www.wordfence.com

Wordfence dotcom help advanced system requirements litespeed

 

[cPanelLauren]

1. Before we hardly had any excessive resource usage warning, now we get them all the time. Here is a typical one:

Resource: Process Time
Exceeded: 1811 > 1800 (seconds)
Executable: /opt/cpanel/ea-php72/root/usr/bin/lsphp

Note that the title is a bit decveiving here, this is not excessive resource usage, it's runtime specifically. This can be followed up in: lfd excessive resource usage warnings with litespeed

 

[ffeingol]

First off, if you have questions about which license to use, I'd suggest contacting LiteSpeed sales. I've always found them very quick to respond / answer questions. Secondly, you really don't want works to match your cores. If, for example, you had a 4 core server, you'd (more than likely) want a 2 worker license. That way LSWS can at most use 2 cores and leave the other two for PHP/MySQL etc.

Internally we did quite a bit of testing with the LSWS WP cache vs. all the others. Quite simply it blew the others out of the water. The main advantage was that it did not cause any CPU or IO load increases on the server. We just basically used ab (Apache Benchmark) to simulate different levels of requests / concurrent users.

We also see the same thing where (occasionally) see LSPHP processes that simply don't end and trigger the LFD execution time alerts. They don't really end up bother much on our servers and we go in and kill them.