Which web server are you using?

DracoBlue

Which web server do you use in the Enhance panel, and in your opinion, which one performs the best? I'm considering setting up an NGINX server.

FabioP

DracoBlue

Hi DracoBlue, i use OpenLiteSpeed (OLS).

jeff

Litespeed

DracoBlue

jeff A good option, but paid.

jeff

DracoBlue

It simply has performed better and yes it's paid, but we're pretty uncompromising in how we choose to host.

kyzoeadmin

apache

twest

Apache is standard for my setups, I can tune it and other services to be blazing fast, it suits my needs and has been a stable and reliable webserver for the decades I've used it.

I'm interested in OLS as an option, it has a great WP plugin that's extremely powerful. I think OLS is just missing a few features like persistent config and updating config without restarting webserver before it can be used (pretty sure I read enhance is working on that). I don't think the expensive paid version is worth it, OLS is good.

I've tried nginx a few times in enhance and other setups, can never get a really good + stable setup. Users always have issues with compatibility.

MediaServe

LiteSpeed for WordPress hosting with full distribution of roles.
Apache for Migrations from cPanel (App+DB together, Email on a separate server.)
OpenLiteSpeed for one Managed VPS client, all roles but backups on the same VPS.

mendozal

I'm using OLS with zero issues so far, but I'm running only a few websites (~ 30). The full LiteSpeed is a little expensive for my scale.

I'd like to run Apache webservers but the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is extremely useful and free.

twest

mendozal yeah the lscache plugin is no joke, it has everything. It even dunks on paid plugins like WP Rocket - who have gone to crap from adding so many auto exclusion that it's basically worthless for JS delaying, they even excluded an ad companies ads, sellouts. Nowadays I like Perfmatters for all advanced optimizations and then pair it with a free basic cache plugin like WP Fastest, easily get sub 1 second page load times on bloated sites that have ads, and getting 99/100 GPSI. I do wish we could use the lscache plugin on other web servers, it's nice having all the premium features in one package (and not crippled by auto exclusions).

The only thing that was better in ols in my tests was TTFB, which dropped from 200ms to 100ms. But it had negligible affect on the rest of load times/total load times.

Redis is really helping make wp-admin load real snappy in both webservers.

milo695

twest

twest you use Perfmatters on most/all WP sites combined with free caching plugin option, correct?

Do you have an example config of Perfmatters as i'm new to it.
Thanks

Andreas

I use apache and Surge plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/surge/)
So far its favourite cache plugin.
I ran loader.io tests and surge is the only plugin for apache that could handle all the traffic with ease.

sip

nothing beats openlitespeed with a good config for WordPress sites.
I use ols on most of my servers. its very straightforward to use and administer.
and its Fast. very fast

twest

sip I'd love to use ols, especially with lsphp, but how do you deal with not being able to have a persistent config? I don't want to have to manually re-optimize every server every time there's an enhance update. Also, do you know how to login to the ols config dashboard via its port? What's the login info for that? Also would you care to share some of your optimization configs? I'm about to post my Apache optimizations in the big ModSecurity thread, since that's where the configs go. I just finished optimizing MySQL yesterday, hope to finish Apache today or tomorrow.

sip

twest i have only just started to test enhance yesterday.
If it doesnt support OLS properly yet then that may well be a deal breaker.

PradeepC

@Adam, Any update on the persistent OLS settings?

twest

sip it's probably fine for small servers, the problem is it doesn't have a persistent config available. That means if you optimize it for your server and an update for Enhance comes out, and you run that update, then your optimized config gets set back to default... If I have a big server with 50 CPU and 250gb ram and enough websites to generate 2 million visits per day, then I need the default config to have limits opened wayyyyy up to handle that load smoothly. If I run enhance update and my config is reset, then instantly all sites will be unresponsive due to overloaded resources from the limitations. It may only take me 2 minutes to run through config to re-add my optimal config, but during that time sites won't work, and worse is we don't know how the server will behave under such stress, it could possibly cause CPU consumption to skyrocket as the system tries serving webpages on tiny limits, maybe it would cause catastrophic failure and couldn't even update the config...

That's my worry.

As for logging in to OLS config, I found you have to create a user login in terminal first, this tutorial for example should work:
https://linuxconfig.org/openlitespeed-default-password

We can buy the paid version of litespeed that has persistent config, but it's expensive. I would need the $100/mo license or $2k owned license. That's a big expense just to have persistent config, and per server too.

I'm happy with Apache for now, my optimized config has always run really well. I just wish I could change from php-fpm to lsapi, litespeeds php runs fast and doesn't require custom config - it just works., that's half of why I want OLS, just to get ls php.

There's another annoyance with OLS at the moment. Any time you update an htaccess file on a website, you need to restart the webserver for the new htaccess to go into affect on the one website. If you imagine having 200 websites on one server, that's a lot of work just to update htaccess all the time.

So two big issues that prevent using OLS seriously. But on small servers or for dedicated servers that have only 1 client, sure it's fine.

sip

I generally have about 5-10 sites per dedi that i manage for clients. and none of them are at very high pageviews.

So hopefully it wont affect me much.
in honesty i havent made any changes to the default ols config since first starting to use it. Perhaps i should look into it more.

In the meantime it might possibly be worth having some small helper scripts to check if a .htaccess file has been modified in any account and if so then it restarts litespeed on that server?
or just a button in control panel to do so easily instead of ssh in to do it on command line.

the htaccess thing has always been there with OLS. i change htaccess so rarely that it hardly affects anything.

But i definitely think that a restart web server button would be very useful.

I read that the reason for the non persistent config for OLS was due to it being in plaintext and not xml.
in the meantime would it not be possible to just read that file and then write it back after? it doesnt need to be parsed. it just needs to be put back to how it was before.
Or agree a structure in the meantime on how it should look?

mendozal

sip Here someone shared a script to detect changes in .htaccess and restart OLS via crontab.

https://community.enhance.com/d/96-ols-reload-for-htaccess-changes/7

twest

sip there's a button in the control panel to restart your webserver, you can find it in the Servers section, click the server you want to restart, then down in the Roles section of that server if you click the Application role there will be a button there to graceful restart. That's restarting the webserver/application container.

The problem with putting config for ols back after an update is what I mentioned above. At scale the server might get bricked when the config is reset, if the system is bricked then I can't put the old config back on. I'd have to get creative by blocking all traffic on the server with external firewall, to lower load enough to get the config fixed. That's a lot of extra work every time there's an enhance update, and then multiply it over 20-30-100 servers and it's just unfeasible... Enhance already has more sysadmin duties required than cpanel since we have to manage package updates, managing config issues during every update would just be too much hassle, especially if there's going to be a potential for downtime.

Darren

One of the biggest advantages of commercial Litespeed over OLS is in the caching it supports ESI. This means you can have elements on the page that 'punch a hole' in the cache; aspects of a page such as a basket other dynamic feature that you definitely don't want to be cached. Commercial Litespeed also supports caching based on a GeoIP DB, so if your site shows different versions to visitors from different countries (e.g. language, or currency) then commercial Litespeed can handle that at a caching level. I don't think OLS supports this.

From a personal perspective, I would tend to go with Apache just because of the level of support and documentation available on the web. You just know something is going to work on Apache. In a shared hosting environment, it can be difficult if a client is asking whether something is a server issue or a site issue, and having to spend a significant amount of time investigating because you can't be 100% sure that something that works in an Apache .htaccess isn't working on OLS for example.

Machiel92

I am a big nginx fan, so i prefer to run my servers fully on nginx, together with nginx cache / fastcgi caching it's really powerful!

When I compare resource usage openlitespeed vs nginx + php-fpm, for me nginx/php-fpm wins.
At this moment there are 22 websites on my (quite cheap hetzner vps), and it's running great!

JohnB

Machiel92 openlitespeed vs nginx + php-fpm, for me nginx/php-fpm wins.

I've found the same. When properly configured, nginx caching will usually beat litespeed caching in performance and load tests. Uncached requests are way faster in nginx IIRC.

No htaccess though which is a dealbreaker if someone relies on a plugin or developer that depends on those features.

I think that's where litespeed shines. You get apache htaccess features and almost nginx performance with very little setup. The Wordpress caching plugin helps too.